In the category of "signs newspapers are about to die," the New York Times reports:

"While all publicly traded newspaper companies have seen their share prices fall in the last year — drops of 50 to 70 percent are commonplace — some have tumbled so far that any number of bargain hunters could snap up a controlling interest, despite the credit squeeze. But they haven’t."

A quote at the end of the article from Peter Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, sums up the situation:

“The market cap of some of these companies, they’re bite-sized and it would be extraordinarily easy for someone to come in and buy them, and a year or two ago, someone would have . . . I would say that what happened to the last round of buyers scared off other bidders, though there weren’t many to begin with. And now there are none.”

What the NYT reports is what I've been feeling about newspapers during the last couple months . . . it seems time is up.