In the very near past, newspapers were making profit margins of 30%, today they are still making margins of 10%. The problem isn't that they are unprofitable (they are more profitable than health insurance companies - 6%), it is that they over extended themselves when times were good. http://online.barrons.com/article_email/SB125633654783004637-lMyQjAxMDI5NTI2NDMyMzQ2Wj.html?page=sp Yes, they will have to update their business model to reflect the realities of the digital world, but most of their woes are related to making less of a profit than they had expected. There is a big difference between making less of a profit and not making any profit.

If you were a taliban fighter and you were upset because you couldn't detonate any of your suicide bombers via a cell phone because the coverage in your country was so horrendous, how would you get the cell infrastructure upgraded? 1) Call government and cell providers and ask them to spend more money on said infrastructure so your fighters could operate more effectively? 2) Issue crazy sounding demand that cell towers are evil and must not be built (or operated at night)? I think #2 would probably pay off in spades. Once they hear that the taliban wants less cell phone coverage, the coalition forces are going to be throwing up towers everywhere. The best part of the plan, is that issuing a crazy threat like this won't necessarily tip off your enemies because they are used to demands like this from you. A third possibility is that the taliban didn't really issue the threat themselves. Instead it was issued by a few (OK, the only) tech support workers in Kabul who are sick and tired of being paged late at night.