Newspapers across the United States are facing difficult financial times, as the ad market declines, circulation decreases and the overall financial climate exacerbates trends already in play. And as the economy worsens, newspapers continue to face more difficulties, most recently illustrated Monday, with the Chicago-based Tribune Co.'s announcement it is filing for bankruptcy.

"But I have to tell you, the really dark predictions about dominoes falling and the Tribune action somehow being the beginning of the end for newspapers are way off base," Douglas Gomery, media economist at the University of Maryland, College Park, told the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune newspaper, this week.

"During the Great Depression, three of the five major movie companies went bankrupt," Gomery told the Baltimore Sun. "And two of them (Fox and Paramount) are still in business, while the third did just fine after reorganization until Howard Hughes ran it into the ground in 1957. What Tribune did is just classic business cycle stuff. This is capitalism."

Although the word bankruptcy sounds scary, and will definitely mean harder times in the short term, it will likely help Tribune in the long run, Tim Rosentiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told the Baltimore Sun.

Tribune's situation is not the situation of all other newspapers either, Rosentiel pointed out. Tribune was billions of dollars in debt from going private, and the decision to file for Chapter 11 had more to do with debt than the state of the industry in the current economic climate, he said, according to the Baltimore Sun.

"It sounds sobering, but bear in mind that all of Tribune's papers are making operating profits, they're just not making as much as they did," John Morton, head of Silver Spring-based Morton Research Inc., told the Baltimore Sun. "They're viable businesses; it's just that the corporation's debt structure has gotten the corporation in trouble."