The problem for newspapers is that they may just run out of time.

It’s quarterly earnings season, and that means another round of speculation and analysis of what the future holds for newspapers. The picture looks bleaker and bleaker every time. Editor & Publisher reports on a new Merrill Lynch study that says it’ll be 30 years before online revenue equals print revenue at newspapers. MediaPost also covers the same report, noting that most papers get less than 7% of their revenue from online ad sales. Who’s got 30 years to wait, particularly when newspaper readership has sunk by 8 million people in the last 17 years?

MediaPost has a column by the head of an advertising network that prescribes four steps newspapers must take to adjust to the new realities of Web 2.0. They include breaking apart online and print staffs and embracing local ad networks. But can newspapers change their cultures and their business models enough to do that? Most won’t. Meanwhile, there’s a young man in Kansas who’s shaking up the newspaper business by building a profitable network of community newspapers. He’s drawing attention from newspaper execs, but will they have the courage to change their models?

History says they won’t. As Clayton Christensen points out in The Innovator’s Dilemma, successful companies are almost incapable of making the changes needed to respond to disruptive change in their markets. It’s simply too painful to endure the layoffs, losses and restructuring turmoil. This is particularly a problem for newspapers, because their print operations, while shrinking, are still profitable. Even if executives see the iceberg ahead – and I think most of them do – they don’t have the mandate from their stakeholders to remake the business. So they just steam ahead and rearrange the deck chairs a bit.

Mainstream media plays such a vital role in the information ecosystem that it’s alarming to see this trend playing out. It may be that the future will belong to something that replaces the current generation of mainstream media rather than to the brands that have existed for over 150 years.