The decline of the American newspaper as it's playing out in large and medium-size cities across America is being told as two stories.

One is a numbers story: shrinking advertising and falling readership. The other is a human story: the personal fallout as more and more journalists and others find themselves out of work.

But there is a third story, and in some ways it's a bigger story, that's not being written, perhaps because we've yet to feel its full impact.

That story is of the impact of those declining circulations. The implications are enormous for advertisers, retail advertisers in particular, for newspapers and for other local media. In some ways it has deeper implications than anything going on in national media.

Consider: If the local paper once had a circulation of 150,000 and now it's down to 130,000, that's 20,000 fewer households that stand to see the full-page ad announcing Saturday's sale on children's shoes. That's 20,000 households that won't receive the freestanding insert announcing the storewide sale on home-improvement products.

It's true that newspapers have been losing circulation for years, but until recently much of that was outlying circulation to cities across the state if it was a state paper or towns on the very edge of a market. It was marginal circulation for advertisers.

The more recent declines have been in core circulation areas, and most worrisome is that those declines are going to get worse in many markets. We will see more papers facing yet steeper declines in readership, or going to just several days a week, as in Detroit, or simply closing.

If you are a retailer in a city like Detroit, where the dailies are now delivered just Thursday, Friday and Sunday, how do you reach your customers Monday through Wednesday?

What do you do in cities where the daily just shut down? What do you do if you are a media buyer with a national client needs to be in those markets?

The quick answer is to go to another medium, say TV or the web. And that may work for some advertisers. But how many?

The fact is, newspapers are a not an easily replaceable medium by virtue of the sheer vastness of their coverage. Imagine a nation where there was just one TV network and that dwarfed all other media. It's watched by everyone, and it gets nearly half of every ad dollar ever spent. That's what the local daily newspaper is, or was, in much of America. It's on doorsteps, in mailboxes, on counters at the local diner, in the in box at work, on the empty seat next you on the bus riding home at day's end.

It reaches the advertiser’s target reader, and it reaches all the potential customers the advertiser may not think of as customers.

What will take the place of this wonderful medium? How will it change how retailers do business in a community? Will yet more new forms of media emerge to serve those needs?

Interesting questions but, alas, questions without answers. We just don't know. But we will start to find out.