Dying Newsprint – Many of the Wounds are Self-Inflicted

There's another, more deep-seeded reason that the newspaper industry is failing.

It has lost all its former internal discipline, and is mostly populated by people who despise their readership. I've worked on the staffs of 4 different daily papers, and the first one where I was employed in the late 1980s was the only one that actually had a department devoted just to proofreading the content before it published – not just in editorial, but in advertising content. The next one I worked for, in the early 1990s, was the last one that did not depend on the internet to shore up a lack of content. The next one, from the mid-90s onward, had an actual circulation department staffed by people focused entirely on guaranteeing distribution and customer service. It was not a single Circulation Officer, but an entire department.

None of those independent factions exist anymore, like they once did. It was also the last paper I worked for that printed its product on-site, rather than shipping it off to another, then hauling it back for distribution in its intended circulation zone. There still exist writers and editors who put out original product worthy of the cover price, but the overall product becomes more and more inferior as a platform for their diligent work, seemingly by the day.

Most content is bought. Graphics are produced by third-party outsourcing – sometimes overseas. In short, the daily newspaper is now a prefabricated consumer commodity; assembly-line packaged, and aimed at nobody in particular – just whomever will spend money for it. Like a fast-food hamburger. Its faux relevance is maintained by a media industry that stirs up "newsworthy" content based on the obsessive, quirky political whims of a customer base, rather than the edification of a "readership."

The newspaper is an obsolete medium, hanging onto its existence because of a dying demographic that is either computer illiterate, stubbornly attracted to tangible products (like a printed newspaper), or both. I myself was raised to appreciate tangible products in exchange for my money – but now even our money is intangible.

The nearness of this demographic's extinction is precisely why the quality of the product has been handed over to automation-based systems staffed by non-skilled labor and out-of-country interlopers who are allowed to undercut the cost of domestic skill-based labor. Quality has in turn decreased accordingly. The newspaper is now a non-product, designed merely to sell, rather than also serve and inform. People are not considered "readers" but "customers" (read "marks.") In some cases it's brought to you by people who would not find work elsewhere, unless it was in production of something equally as worthless. It is consumed by a section of the population that the media wishes would hurry up and die off.

Don't place blame for this tragedy solely on the Internet.