In the most recent circulation numbers for newspapers, there appears to be an easing in the slide of recent years, with average daily circulation for 745 newspapers down 2.1 percent for the past six months versus the year-earlier period.

That's better than the 2.8 percent and 2.5 percent for the prior six-month periods.

Yet behind those numbers there's a particularly disturbing trend. It's the even sharper declines for the traditional big city newspapers, such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. The Post was down 3.4 percent, the Times off 4.2 percent and the Tribune down 2.1 percent. Newsday fell nearly 7 percent.

What's alarming is that some analysts see the downward trend only accelerating.

Indeed, they paint a grim future for most if not all of America's big city newspapers. They see many shrinking in size to mere shadows of their former selves. Rather than being the dominant voice in their communities, they will become just one voice among many.

What will drive this dramatic shrinkage? Certainly the internet but also increasing print competition led largely by free dailies, such as the Examiner chain, which now has papers in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore and plans to expand beyond.

Free dailies are not new. The Metro chain first launched in this country in 2001, in Philadelphia, and it has since spread to other cities.

What's changing is that more are coming, perhaps many more, and their markets of choice will be America's big cities.

That second wave is already here. Just weeks ago, in Boston, a city long dominated by the Boston Globe, Boston Now launched to compete not just with the Globe and the Herald, the city's other paid daily, but also the free Boston Metro and a slew of free alternative papers, as well as dozens other dailies and community newspapers in the greater Boston market. The Globe was already hurting when Boston Now launched, its circulation down some 4 percent for the recent six-month period.

The explosion of free papers is already underway in Europe, and their key advantage is that they can enter markets quickly, without having to undertake lengthy, expensive circulation drives. They simply print and distribute their papers free of charge, then approach advertisers with rates a fraction of what the paid dailies charge.

Not all the freesheets, as they're called, will succeed, but the effect, already seen in Europe, will be to drain off both readers and ad dollars, and that will make it particularly difficult for the largest dailies, which have high fixed costs. They'll have little choice but to cut costs--and circulation.

Instead of one major publication in major cities, there will be many, more vertical publication targeting specific readerships. Or that's the future analysts like Miles Groves foresee.

“It’s a very different world that’s going to have small target print products in major markets,” says Groves, an industry consultant with MG Strategic Research in Washington and former chief economist for the Newspaper Association of America.

Groves and others see the shrinking trend largely bypassing the national papers. “The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are strong national brands, and they had an early online presence,” he says. "These guys can compete, and they will be with us."

He believes smaller papers will remain largely immune as well, being in markets too small to be attractive to freesheet publishers.

If this freesheet trend does in fact take hold, it has huge implications for American journalism. It's the big city papers that each year win the Pulitzer Prizes for their innovative reporting. Those papers have been big enough, and profitable enough, to undertake lengthy, in-depth projects that bring prestige to the paper but could never be justified on economic grounds.

If those papers shrink dramatically, there's no reason to believe the freesheets will step in, with their typically small staffs of less-experienced reporters.

Of course not everyone agrees with this doomsday scenario.

Some industry observers contend big city papers are too deeply embedded to be rooted out so quickly. Len Kubas, president of Kubas Consultants, a Toronto-based newspaper consulting firm, notes that many big city dailies have built up robust web sites that serve to extend their brands against threats arising on the print side of their businesses.

Kubas also notes a whole trend among papers toward hyper-local reporting to strengthen ties with readers. “And this is happening in Miami, Dallas, Denver and Eugene, Oregon, and cities across the nation,” Kubas says.

“There are too many doomsayers who fail to realize that local newspapers usually tend to be the first choice for people seeking information about their community.”

Kubas notes that papers are getting much more aggressive about dealing with change.

“These are signs that newspapers will not go quietly into the dark night, but recognize that they have to change to meet new expectations of advertisers and readers,” Kubas says. “The industry is quite resourceful, and the rate of change will accelerate in a positive direction now that the reality of not changing is becoming obvious.”