Not so. Newspapers reached peak profits in the 1990's. At least, this is common wisdom from many people I know who worked at one at the time. Lots of first class travel and good per diems. This was also the time that lots of papers got bought up by big media companies.

Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.