"We don't normally write about the newspaper industry," began an editorial in the New Haven Register in December. "The conflict of self-interest is too apparent." But, as newspapers across the country falter, the Register's editorial board felt the need to speak out. "Newspapers are chroniclers of local life, the impartial reporter of events and the watchdog for the public interest," it opined. "Whatever its form, dead trees or electronic bytes, there will always be a need for the information and commentary that professional journalists provide."

Less than 10 weeks later, the Journal Register Co., owner of the New Haven Register, filed for bankruptcy. And news of the filing was relegated to a six-paragraph item on the bottom of the Register's business page that carried no by-line and read like a condensed version of JRC's corporate press release.Meanwhile, another JRC pub, The Record of Troy, N.Y., buried its parent's bankruptcy news on page 42. We know this because one of its rivals, the Times Union of Albany, N.Y., a Hearst Corp. paper, gave prominent billing to that factoid in its own report on the JRC filing, which it ran on its business section front page.

-- An earlier version of this column incorrectly reported that the New Haven Register did not carry news of the Journal Register Co.'s bankruptcy filing. --

Welcome to the wacky world of newspapers covering not just the alleged demise of their industry, but of their competitors and of themselves. In the past few weeks, we've seen several newspaper publishers file for bankruptcy, close publications, slash dividends or post lousy results. And we watched the papers these companies own struggle to report on these grim events or, in some cases, simply ignore them.

Perhaps the latter option, as objectionable as it is, would have been a better choice for the San Francisco Chronicle, which chose to cover the late-February news that its parent, Hearst, might shut down the newspaper via a front-page story that read like a corporate press release, complete with canned quotes from Hearst bigwigs. The piece, which carried the byline "Chronicle Staff Report," didn't disclose the fact that the paper was in mortal danger until the second paragraph -- an eternity considering that this was making news around the world. While other outlets screamed "Hearst threatens to close historic 'San Francisco Chronicle' " (London's Independent) or "Hearst Threatens to End San Francisco Paper" (The New York Times), the Chronicle could muster only a tepid "Chronicle faces cuts in staff, expenses." Not exactly a stop-the-presses moment.

Indeed, the paper's lede couched the Hearst announcement as an effort by the company to "reverse" the paper's operating losses by "seeking near-term cost savings that would include 'significant' cuts to both union and nonunion staff." But not a single detail about any of these cuts is provided in the story. Instead, we are told that "the company did not specify the size of the staff reductions or the nature of the other cost-saving measures it has in mind." And apparently, the anonymous authors of the piece couldn't get any information on their own -- or were discouraged from printing it if they did.

Things are not always so vague at troubled Hearst papers. When the company announced in January that it would shutter the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it couldn't find a buyer in 60 days, that paper got straight to the point. "After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history," read the lede on its mournful front page story, which weighed in at more than 2,700 words. Perhaps it was motivated by the fact that a local TV station broke the news the evening before Hearst's official announcement. That prompted rival Seattle Times to write its own piece on the development, which said the managing editor of the P-I did not know whether the TV report was true or not.

But for sheer pathos it is hard to beat the final edition of E.W. Scripps Co.'s Rocky Mountain News, which ended its almost 150-year run on Feb. 27. "Goodbye, Colorado," read a front page modeled after its first issue in 1859. "It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today," begins the paper's self-prepared obit, which included a 52-page special section on the paper's history. "It's very rare that you get to play the music at your own funeral, so you want to make sure you do it well," John Temple, the newspaper's editor, publisher and president, was quoted as saying about the final edition. "I want to play something that you can listen to for years to come."

Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.