Mike Patel’s location can’t be beat.

At the intersection of Chambers and Broadway, his newsstand sees an endless flow of City Hall workers, Wall Street types, court employees, and tourists. And yet he’s not selling many papers.

“Newspapers are down,” Mr. Patel, an immigrant from India who has owned the stand for more than two decades, said. “Everything is down.”

Longtime New York newsstand operators like Mr. Patel are growing increasingly lonely. Only 280 newsstands are in business today, down from a high of more than 1,500 in the 1940s, when the city was a booming newspaper town with eight general interest dailies.

The drop reflects, in part, the hardships facing daily newspapers. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported last month the greatest semiannual fall in circulation of American daily newspapers in more than a decade. Its numbers also show acceleration in the continuing decline in circulation, which has bedeviled the industry since the peak years of the mid-1980s. The decreasing interest of the young in reading, the rise of Internet news, and free dailies are believed to be responsible for the decline.

In addition, newsstand owners said they have suffered from the city’s economic downturn and from efforts to clean up public spaces.

There has been a “general trend in recent years to get all those people off the streets, and it’s a large issue,” a noted city historian, Kenneth Jackson, said.

“New York’s vibrancy derives because you have people selling every 20 feet,” Mr. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University, said. Without vendors, he continued, “You can have a sterile street environment like Washington.”

Mr. Patel blames the Internet for his decline in sales. When he opened his stand in 1980,”a lot of people were buying the paper like crazy,” he said. Before the Internet, he said, his customers relied on afternoon as well as morning papers to follow stock prices.

Since then, his newspaper sales have slipped by nearly 90%, he said, and he has watched dozens of fellow newsstand owners sell their businesses or give up.

The city has tried before to shore up the newsstand industry. In 1979, responding to a 75% drop in the number of stands since the 1950s, the city enacted a law that allowed newsstands to expand in size and sell merchandise other than printed matter. Refrigerated drinks were introduced, and newsstands began to sell everything from costume jewelry to international calling cards.

Seeing fresh potential for profit, enterprising immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, such as Mr. Patel, began to dominate the market. Now, however, many of them said their profit margin appears to have evaporated.

What revenue there is does not come from newspapers. Mr. Patel’s best-selling paper, the New York Post, for example, nets him only 4 cents a copy.

“If you just sell the paper, forget it, you’re out of business right away,” Mr. Patel said. Much more profitable than newspapers are lottery tickets, for which he nets 6 cents each, and candy, which earns him 25 cents.

“If you don’t have a Lotto, forget it,” Mr. Patel said.

However, uptown at the corner of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, Mohamed Rashed said papers are still key to luring customers, as well as the necessary component to satisfy city laws.

“It brings people in selling a variety. It’s one-stop shopping,” Mr. Rashed, an immigrant from Bangladesh, said. “If you don’t have the newspaper, people aren’t coming. It helps to buy other stuff. Like for the cigarettes, for the candy.”

On a recent morning at Mr. Rashed’s stand, where he sells papers from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week, there was brisk business as customers stopped by from the subway. One bought the Chinese daily the World Journal, two picked up the New York Post, and another the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the steady flow, Mr. Rashed said sales were disappointing. He blames the fall on companies that promote home delivery and hawkers who undercut his prices, sometimes on the same block as his stand. Also, free daily and weekly papers are taking their toll.

The most recent blow, operators said, is the city’s move to franchise newsstands, along with other forms of “street furniture,” such as bus shelters and public toilets. Under the plan, which the counsel to the New York City Newsstand Operators Association, Robert Bookman, is challenging in state Supreme Court, the current crop of newsstands would be replaced with uniform, privately built ones owned by the city. A franchise would rent out the new stands, and ad space on them.

City officials have said the plan would benefit newsstands as well as provide millions of dollars in new municipal revenue.

Still, Mr. Patel, whose stand would have to be moved under the new regulations, sees it as a recipe for disaster.

“There’s no place to go. It will get rid of the newsstands,” he said. “There are little sales. Who’s going to afford it?”