The large big city newspapers that dominated the news for the entire duration of the American republic and before are quietly passing from the scene one by one. The coming of the Internet has put newsprint in the same category as horse-drawn carriages.
I am still a loyal paper reader every morning. However, it is not the front page that drives me to walk out in the cold and pick up the latest edition on the driveway, but the sport page, the editorials, and the local news. Everything on page one I already read about on the Internet before I went to bed last night. That is one of the problems isn’t, the news in the paper is dated for sure. It’s ‘old news’ by the time it hits the pavement.
I can remember when every city had 2 papers, one in the morning and one to read after work. One by one all of the evening papers either when out of business or started publishing in the morning instead. Why? Because of the coming of TV news–the PM papers became obsolete. Folks who wanted up-to-date news turned to the TV instead while eating dinner. Then came the cable-news 24 hour cycle and the Am news programs which began to eat away at the Am paper circulation.
Now the Internet and with it several generations of young people coming on who never open a paper but hit their computer ‘on’ button instead. A new cultural icon is replacing an ancient one.
There is also another major reason why some of the big city papers are losing circulation needlessly and you won’t find this mentioned in the NY Times article linked above. Most of the papers cited in the article are known to be quite liberal and slanted hard to the left in their presentation of the news.
I gave up on the L.A. Times nearly 15 years ago cause I couldn’t take their obvious bias anymore. I put up with it for years because they had a good sports page and had a couple of conservative editorial writers. But one by one the conservatives were eliminated and the editorial page became nearly unreadable for a conservative Christian like myself.
Lately, I been offered the Times at 1/2 price or even free for a two months trial and have turned it down. I will probably be celebrating when the last issue of that venerable paper is printed (Well maybe not since hundreds of good folks will lose their jobs).
But not so with papers in general. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid in the 50’s, starting out with the comics of coarse. I still take the OC Register and hope to as long as they still deliver. It would be sad to see them all pass quietly into the night or should I say morning, the night ones already died years ago.