Newsflash! People Use Internet to Read News!

The Los Angeles Times reports on the travails of the San Francisco Chronicle as it struggles to deal with a loss of advertising revenue and readership due to a new-fangled invention called the In-ter-net. What with people surfing news websites and using Craigslist for classified ads, the Chron doesn't know what to make of itself.

The Chron hasn't been an especially strong paper in recent years anyway. And when you're talking about a city that has an especially large net of Wi-Fi hotspots, I don't think it should come as a surprise that people might make other choices about the consumption of newsmedia than a paper. Of course, unscientific surveys like this one make that point even easier to prove:

"During a recent visit to Zalles' laundry, only one of 10 customers was reading the Chronicle, and he wasn't a subscriber. Four were reading from laptops, and all said the Internet was their preferred source for news."

So what were the other 5 doing? Maybe that is the trend we should really be tracking.