Truth be told, there was not much good to say about newspapers this year, and 2012 isn't looking any better.

Ad revenue and circulation continued their sharp declines in 2011, and publishers struggled to adapt their newsrooms and ad salespeople to a web-first mentality.

At the same time, real questions began to arise about the long-term outlook for papers.

Earlier this month a report from the University of South California's widely respected Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism predicted that most print newspapers would be gone within five years, with only the very large, like The New York Times, and the very small, like your local weekly, surviving.

That's a severe outlook, to say the least, but it captures a growing sense that the print model is a lot more endangered than was believed just several years ago. Back then it was thought that declines in advertising and circulation would slow and then stabilize at some imagined point.

That imagined point moves further and further out into the future.

Analysts agree that the most important thing newspapers can do, with ad revenue and circulation sure to decline again in 2012, is to embrace new media more aggressively than ever before.

"It's critical that newspapers figure out digital," says Ed Strapagiel, executive vice president of KubasPrimedia, a consulting firm in Canada. "The ones that don't will die unless they're among a handful that have a special reason to exist in print."

Digital now includes a range of devices beyond the traditional internet, ranging from tablets to smartphones.

Though newspapers have begun experimenting with these devices, they have moved tentatively, nervous about losing readers for the print product and not quite sure how to go about monetizing these new offerings to offset print declines.

They've been down this road before, or one very much like it.

Faced with the rise of the internet more than a decade ago, publishers struggled over whether to put their stories online, rightly worried that it would lead to circulation declines as readers dropped their paid subscriptions to get stories online at no cost.

But most felt they had no choice. Not doing so, they feared, would marginalize their publications, opening the way for online-only media to steal away readers and advertisers attracted by the much lower cost of internet advertising.

As it turned out, both happened. Circulations dropped and new competitors arose to steal away readers and advertisers.

But by then there was no turning back; readers were trained to expect free online content.

Now publishers are faced with the challenge of instituting paywalls and coming up with other for-pay options. While The New York Times appears to be succeeding in those areas, and other papers have rolled out such their own versions, it's still very unclear whether they will be widely adopted by readers.

But they have little choice but to try.

"Newspapers must pursue digital, but they have to pick up the pace several fold," Strapagiel says.

Combined print and web ad revenue for newspapers is on pace for the worst year since 1983.

Things will not improve next year. U.S. newspaper ad spending will be off 8 percent in 2012 compared to 2011, according to London-based agency ZenithOptimedia.

Spending will total $24.975 billion next year, or less than half of what the industry pulled in during the boom days of 2006.

Analysts say that in addition to reorganizing for the digital age, papers must also take a hard look at their ad pricing and rate structures, which are complicated and antiquated.

"The larger the paper, the more peripheral publications they have, and that makes it even more complex. Throw in digital in all its various forms and flavors, and things get worse exponentially," Strapagiel says.

"It all makes buying newspaper very difficult. There are ways of cleaning this up, like universal spending-based contracts and modular ad sizing. The tough part is not selling it to advertisers, but selling it to the newspaper."