In the New Year’s Day edition of the Marin Independent Journal, the editors gave the readers a report on the health of the IJ and the news business in general. They identified four reasons for the problems facing newspapers: The debt of newspaper chains (the IJ is owned by MediaNews, which is up to its eyeballs in debt); a decline in classified advertising; younger audiences moving to the Web, and the economy in general.

“Unlike some of our sister companies around the nation, we are profitable. We are not as profitable as we were, but we’re doing OK,” the IJ reported. [More]