I took the dogs on an early morning walk today, before most people in the neighborhood I walk in were awake. Which means most of the newspapers were still on the driveway. Here’s what I saw:

Out of approximately 300 homes, maybe one-third had a newspaper delivered. Five years ago, nearly every home would have had a paper on the driveway.

Of the subscribers in the neighborhood, three out of four received the local paper, called the Daily Herald.

The Chicago Tribune, once a giant not only in America but in the world (I wrote a syndicated column there for four years), was nearly nowhere. I did the ballpark numbers — and the Trib was on less than 10 percent of the driveways I passed.

Here are the marketing lessons:

• If it can happen to the Chicago Tribune, it can happen to you.
• In consumer electronics, it’ll happen with 10,000 times the speed.
• The world changes, you must change with it. Better yet, anticipate the change, and work it into your strategy. (What’s an example of this? How about the coming crisis in desktop PC sales. How do you plan to react if you make mobile devices? What if you make software? What if you’re a marketing agency, or a PR company? Anticipate, adjust, react.
• You must continue to innovate both your products and your marketing. Newspapers started cutting back years ago. Innovation stalled. People decided they have more interesting options — for free! — elsewhere. Also, newspapers have done nothing interesting when it comes to marketing in ages.
• If you do nothing, competition, and, eventually, the world will pass you by. With newspapers, executives watched for years as the world passed them by, resisting making changes. Heck, many of them are still resisting making changes.

By the way, the same thing is happening in book publishing as you read this.

Things change. You must react, innovate, and move forward.

Fight the world, and the world wins.