SI AUGUSTO MONTERROSO siguiera entre nosotros no tardaría mucho en actualizar su más famoso cuento, el de una sola frase, cambiándolo a "Y cuando despertó, el periódico seguía allí; hacía años que todos sus lectores habían muerto de viejo":

Newspaper readership is down. Fewer young people are picking them up, and the average age of a newspaper reader is now 55, according to a Carnegie Corporation study. Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups.

Newspaper profits and the stock prices of the companies that own them were also down during the first half of 2005. The biggest newspapers are cutting staffs, closing foreign bureaus and taking other steps to meet their owners' profit goals.

Most of these dire trends are nothing new. Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction.

Since the advent of the Internet, a common version of the doom forecasts has the ink-on-paper news being supplanted by something not-quite-yet-describable on the Web.

Aside from cutting budgets, U.S. newspapers -- including the Twin Cities' two big dailies -- are strategizing to improve the outlook.

Wednesday, the Star Tribune rolls out its new design, with changes far beyond its appearance, including a twice-weekly section of international news. The goal, according to Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, is not so much to turn non-subscribers into subscribers but to entice every category of reader to read more.

On an average weekday, about 55 million newspapers are sold nationally, down from 63 million in 1985, according to Editor and Publisher magazine.

The decline could be called gradual. But it looks worse if you take into account the failure of newspaper circulation to keep up with population growth. Total daily newspaper circulation as a percentage of all U.S. households ("penetration") has been falling sharply since its all-time high of 123 percent in 1950 to its current 51 percent.