Could maybe the death of the newspaper is attributed to more factors than just the rise of the internet and a lack of both print and Web-based ad sales?
Perhaps the fact that Pew research has shown that more Americans do not trust the media to be balanced, to be fair, to be more than just shills trying to sell a product (the paper, the O'Reilly Factor, or the Brit Hume newshour), or to be less than melodramatic...maybe this could attributed to the decline in newspaper readership. And most complaints I get from people about the news media in general concern two facets of the business: that we're molodramatic, we have tendencies to bandwagon and we make mountains out of molehills. That just turns people off, especially in 10-15 inches, when there's more aspects to any given story.
Maybe that, in conjunction with Americans being a little more tapped out given our economic situation in most parts of the country and in most strata of socio-economic status. More Americans work longer hours and have other crap going on, like taking little Johnny to soccer practice or cheerleading practice or spelling bee practice, and more Americans are "multi-tasking" to the point where they are always at work -- being that it's easy to log on via your laptop to your office computer and do some work -- make calls on your cell phone -- send some emails on your Blackberry (what's the deal with calling gadgets fruit names? Why the blackberry and not the peach, or the kiwi fruit?). Maybe Americans just don't have any freaking time to sit down and read the feature story on the wheelchair basketball star, or the run-down on the Cards World Series win when they probably heard all about it via emails and water-cooler gossip, or read about it on the CNN or ESPN crawl.
And then there's a lot of competition out there for what Americans do spend their free time doing or reading. There's much more entertaining Web sites out there than the Hometown Daily News, and most newspapers dumb everything down, and the stories are very brief.
But more than anything, I think Americans are collectively getting dumber, and fewer Americans read just for the sake of reading something. Just the other day, I was speaking with a second-year high school teacher. She teaches social studies, and I swear to god she said in conversation that she only reads when she has to, meaning reading something for her job, as in an itinerary, a student's report or assignment, or some continuing education stuff. She doesn't read just for the sake of learning about something, anything.
And the context of the conversation was over politics and voting. She doesn't vote, and feels no urge to do so because she says they're all crooks, but likes the Republicans the best because they say nice simple things that are easy to understand. I countered by pointing out how some Republicans just say what people want to hear, and I gave her concrete examples and backed it up with facts on a given situation that affects my area. She asked me how I knew this and I said because I read, and then pointed out many written primary sources. She said, "I don't read unless I have to..."
But there's other reasons why newspapers are failing, maybe slowly. Maybe the essence of the matter is people just don't care anymore...maybe the few who still read the papers do so because there's content in it about them, such as a story about a government entity feeling some public backlash or legislative scrutiny, or about a political candidate's run for office, or little Johnny fumbling the ball on the 10-yard line that inevitably turned the corner for Podunk High, which beat Hometown by six.
