I’ve been saying for years that the newspaper industry is declining because there’s nothing in newspapers that people want to read.

It turns out that in a way I was right, but I didn’t think it the whole way through. Vin Crosbie, one of the great media “thinkers,” postulates that really there just isn’t enough in modern newspapers that people want to read.

Crosbie has begun a series of essays in his Digital Deliverance blog describing the decline and fall of the American newspaper industry. That’s right — it doesn’t seem so far that Crosbie expects the industry to recover from its current crisis.

The main reason? Newspapers have ignored the essential economic law of supply and demand. His full essay on that topic is here, and I don’t see the need to restate the entire thing here.

His essential point is that the basic newspaper package of news selected by editors for a mass audience is obsolete in an age when information consumers have access to many different sources of information. Newspapers’ general news package — the same articles distributed to all of their subscribers — can no longer compete with hundreds of cable channels, niche magazines and Web sites.

I’m eager to read the rest of Crosbie’s commentary as he releases it over the next few days or weeks.