Simon Dumenco at Advertising Age is not only sick of hearing the death tolls of the newspaper industry, but he declares that the New York Times is committing "slow-motion suicide." He's dumbstruck that the Gray Lady has just cut its stock tables from the print edition, something he says should have been done years ago.

In Dumenco's view, instead of newspapers being "platform-agnostic," as NYT chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said a few years ago, they should be "platform proactive," meaning they should use only the medium that best serves the story; for example, making music reviews available as podcasts and art reviews on the website with plenty of images to accompany and enrich the story.

Former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Financial World Magazine, Douglas McIntyre, writes on the Media Stock blog that Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has "probably missed the opportunity" to take full advantage of the Internet and that it may not be able to recover.

Although it has been shown that WSJ.com would be the fifth largest paper in the United States if included in circulation figures, McIntyre doesn't think that its numbers are too impressive. Subscriptions only rose by 56,000 from 2004 to 2005 and the number average monthly unique visitors to the site is falling.   

Not to mention that Internet native companies Microsoft, Yahoo and now Google all offer financial sites that have had huge success, which is one reason why Reuters will distribute its content on Google.

With this free competition, would Dow Jones be the wiser for scrapping the subscription wall and opening its content to be searchable by one or all of these popular portals? Should the New York Times begin to scale back on its print edition by placing Web-suitable articles online? What do you think?

Sources: AdAge (NYT, Reuters), Media Stock