These variances suggest that the future of newspapers, rather than being determined entirely by sweeping trends, can be significantly affected by company culture and management — even at papers of quite different sizes.

A culture of inertia, and a lack of appetite for risk

And what is this cultural problem? According to Pew, several of the senior managers who were interviewed described a culture of “inertia” that made change difficult to achieve within the paper, and another executive said bluntly that “there’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now.” According to this executive, no one wanted to take the risk of trying to change or innovate because of a fear that they would not succeed — and then their company would fail anyway, and they would be blamed for it. “There might be a 90-percent chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10-percent chance you might find the new model,” this executive said, and “no one is willing to take that chance.”

GigaOM