Take a look at this bankruptcy scorecard for newspaper companies and you’ll get a snapshot of some of the disastrous business decisions made in the publishing and newspaper businesses. Too much debt and a complete misunderstanding of the new media landscape led to doom for many lenders in this space.

The good news is that many of these companies have dramatically reduced their debt, so perhaps now they can make rational, long-term business decisions. Hopefully they won’t be stupid enough to erect pay walls on their content, and focus instead on finding new sources of revenue from things like the iPad and other tablets where they can charge for the convenience of delivery, rather than charging for online access to their content.