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Vin Crosbie at Digital Deliverance is a critic of the newspaper industry and a consultant who helps companies adopt new media.

Last year he took time off for pondering. He went back to school, teaching and talking with journalism academics. He discovered that the academics were further behind the curve than clueless newspaper executives and worthless new-media consultants.

Crosbie has delivered an updated critique of American newspapers that should worry every staff member still employed by a daily, and most employed by weeklies.

Crosbie’s prognosis:

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies — namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily. Further layoffs of staffs by those newspapers’ companies cannot avoid this fate – not so long as daily circulations and readerships continually and increasingly decline. (Layoffs are becoming little more than the remedy of bleeding that was used in attempts to cure ill patients during the 18th Century and cannot restore the industry’s health.)

What does Mr. Crosbie give as the major reason for the long slow death of American daily newspapers?

You might, with a sneer, think he would suggest that they were slow in adopting alternative or new media. But you would be wrong. He thinks multimedia and blogs and interactivity merely dull the pain of a dying patient.

Read his entire essay. It’s well worth your time.

(Hat tip: The Editors Weblog.)