Who is to blame?

There is really not much journalists can do if newspapers believe, and are right in their claim that the primarily cause of their financial crisis is "loss of advertising revenue" (table 4 in Chyi, Lewis & Zhang, 2012), because then the money problem is not [directly] due to most news consumers' unwillingness to pay for digital content, which goes back to an entirely different argument on value creation, etc. Rather, the money problem lies in most, if not all advertising departments' inability to effectively please their clients, the advertisers, in today's media environment. 

I've asked this question when Jim Moroney came to give a talk at Rosental's entrepreneurial journalism class last year, and I continue to wonder about this question today -- notwithstanding the importance of quality journalism in reaching and keeping news audiences, which is clearly something that newspapers are doing wrong with their incessant layoffs that, while cut cost, significantly weaken their "iron core"  (Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy) -- if newspapers' predominate economic problem lies in their loss of advertising revenue (news consumers were never commercial newspapers' primary target in the past for revenue anyway), why do we seldom hear industry discussions on the need for new advertising models in the midst of their frequent discussions about paywalls, etc.? Even in their discussions of "new business models," most focus on finding ways to charge news consumers rather than improving their advertising strategies-- have they already declared it a losing battle against Google?

"It wasn't that the newspaper didn't have an audience. It had a huge audience. But it was increasingly an audience that read the Web edition, where advertising sells for a fraction of what it brings in the print edition" (Jones, 2009, p. 176).