SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Newspaper headlines have skewered money lenders for dubious decisions that stoked the recession. Now the financiers are starting to headline newspapers in a new way — as the owners.

These newspaper novices are taking control through bankruptcy proceedings and giving few clues about their turnaround plans. Their decisions will be crucial because this new age of media ownership is unfolding at a time that could make or break some of the largest publications.

Banks and other financial firms have taken over or are angling to take charge at dozens of newspapers, including four of the nation's 15 largest — the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The new owners face huge problems. Newspaper ad revenue, the industry's main source of income, is on pace to total around $27 billion this year, about $22 billion less than three years ago.

Newspaper circulation is falling faster than ever.

Finding solutions — such as mining Web sites for more revenue while newspapers protect what's left of their print franchises — will likely require a financial commitment that short-term owners might be reluctant to make, says Fitch Ratings analyst Mike Simonton. Lenders that take over a company through bankruptcies typically try to sell their stakes within two to three years.

But there's another way of looking at this transition: The last few years have gone so badly that newspapers need to try something different - and "new blood in the industry'' could help, says John Temple, who was publisher of The Rocky Mountain News in Denver when its owner, E.W. Scripps Co., closed it in February.

A common theme in newspaper bankruptcies is that publishers took on too much debt to pay for acquisitions in better times. Now the banks that financed those deals are hoping to recoup at least some of their investments by forgiving or writing off most of the debt - in exchange for controlling stakes in the publications.

Instead of trying to engineer a turnaround, the new owners could just close the newspapers and auction off their assets. But Simonton doubts that will happen because newspapers don't have a lot of valuable inventory like retailers that have been liquidated.

Instead, the bleak market conditions make it more likely that some newspapers are bound to be owned, even briefly, by bankers such as JP Morgan Chase & Co. and financial firms such as Angelo, Gordon & Co., which specializes in buying the debt of distressed companies.