Former Des Moines Register columnist and editor Richard Doak wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s paper that bemoans the slow decline of traditional print newspapers, arguing that other types of news outlets will never be an adequate substitute:

The world has become saturated with new media, but it is the oldest of the old media, newspapers, that remain virtually the only enterprises that actually go out and dig up news. The other media tend to be mere conduits that pass on news, or echo chambers of commentary about news that was originally reported in newspapers.

But beneath Doak’s rather simplistic taxonomy of news organizations lies a deeper, surprisingly harsh critique of corporate media executives, laid out right in the pages of a newspaper owned by Gannett Co. Inc.

I have no solution, but I do have an observation. Newspaper corporations have been paying their CEOs millions of dollars a year. These corporate chieftains have only one job, really – to develop the new business model and guide their operating units through the transition to a new era of success.

The CEOs simply haven’t earned their pay. Amid bankruptcies, closings and shrinking news staffs, the industry is no closer to a successful new model than it was five years ago.

If the big newspaper corporations can’t reinvent their product, perhaps it’s time to break them up. Let each community newspaper seek its own path, rather than following cookie-cutter dictates from their corporate owners.

Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received a bonus of $875,000 in 2008, according to Gannett Blog, and his total compensation was valued at $3.1 million by the Associated Press.

During 2008, Gannett’s stock price plummeted by nearly 80 percent, and the company was forced to adopt significant cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, in its newsrooms “information centers” across the country.