An interesting story by Robert MacMillan on the slow death of, well, newspaper industry stock analysts, amidst the doom and gloom scenario of the industry they are covering. And why is this important? As the story says, the void in smart thinking on the publishing sector could exacerbate an already bleak view of the business..."the less information that’s distributed, the less appearance there is in the minds of institutional investors,” said the ever-present newspaper analyst John Morton.

Two years ago, investors could get research from more than a dozen analysts...now there are less than half of them. Prudential cut all its sell-side analysts as it exited the research business and other firms have pruned, including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

Meanwhile, other sources of analysis have arisen, and the story mentions Lauren Rich Fine, the respected, 19-year analyst at Merrill Lynch who retired in 2007. She, as regular readers know, has been contributing to our site in the last few months. Outsell’s Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter, a venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, are two well-read commentators.