Mark Pinsky’s piece in Media Guardian today is a sanguine look at Reductions in Force (RIFs) across the US newspaper market and his own - unexpected - redundancy from the position of religious affairs correspondent on a southern title.

The US market is in turmoil with circulations across the country in freefall, advertising revenues going over a cliff and hundreds of titles laying off thousands of journalists. Pinksy blames the way that newspapers are produced:

Grown complacent - fat, dumb and happy - the industry became boring and irrelevant. The great minds that lead us missed two significant internet threats. Craigslist and eBay have gobbled up our classified advertising goldmine; and newspaper strategists chose a business model based on giving away our information rather than finding a way to extract some revenue for it. Both developments have been financially disastrous.

Pinsky’s right about the complacency bit - US newspapers did nothing in the face of the internet revolution until it was way too late. But he’s wrong about not giving away information for free: yes, the papers should have developed their web advertising strategies much faster but, no, protecting old pay models would not have saved the titles, merely accelerated their decline.

The UK market is in better shape with the same Fleet Street competitive bloodlust now transferred online. And the London nationals - with the exception of the Express - are starting to make money from their online activities. Print sales continue to decline but at least there is now a coherent strategy about how to replace them with web users and advertisers.

But - as with the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch - America’s woes are transferring eastwards across the Pond. Look at the UK’s regional and local newspaper businesses and you see the American problem in microcosm. Papers - particularly the local weekly titles - grew fat and complacent during the good years, failing to invest in online publishing in any meaningful way. Now, as  sources of local information proliferate, readers are turning away from their local weeklies in droves. Too many of them - including some once doughty titles - are now almost entirely filled with pictures of children and cheque presentations. Court reporting, investigations and the hard-edged scrutiny of local government have almost entirely disappeared from some parts of the country.

I fear that we are only just at the beginning of a shake-out in the UK’s local newspaper business. A friend in a senior position at one of the country’s leading independent publishers told me recently that the group is expecting to lose somewhere between £2million and £3million this year and more next - and this is at one of the groups which is desperately trying to get its act together. The loss of editorial jobs is quickening with Archant, Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror and Northcliffe all looking to shed staff. The subs have been the first to go but the accountants are now starting to lay off reporters as the slump in regional advertising revenue becomes a crash.

As with the Isle of Thanet Gazette and the splash that doesn’t appear on its website, there are plenty of local newspapers which are still clinging to the wreckage of a business model built 150 years ago. Plenty of these titles are going to go to the wall over the next 12 to 24 months. Some may survive as free titles, but the only future for most of them is as online publishers operating with a fraction of their current workforces. Even then, it’s hard to see how some of them will cut it - in my own part of Kent a group of citizen journalists on a village website produce more news about the area that I live in than the local newspaper does in six months.

This is probably the future for community news - hyper-local, user-generated and supported by advertising supplied by Google. I struggle to see where traditional publishers fit in here.