We're getting closer to a time when there will be no newspapers

"It's too much for me. I just can't understand it anymore, so I just try not to think about it."
-- Allen Drury, PRESERVE AND PROTECT

If you have ever read Drury's six-book series that started with the Pulitzer Prize winning "Advise and Consent" in the late '50s and ended with nuclear war in the mid '70s, you probably will remember that by the second half of the series, the media had become a favorite target of the author.

The above quote, from the fourth book in the series, says almost all that needs to be said about why the media have become so powerful.

Average people just don't have the time, the energy or for the most part the education to keep up.

It doesn't say why the media have become so bad. That's a much sadder and stranger story. There are villains, but no heroes, and the story says a great deal about why so many things in our society are declining, not least of them the understanding of average Americans of how life works in the 21st century.

I need to state my prejudice in this right now. I love newspapers and have subscribed to at least one daily newspaper for almost my entire adult life. I have always believed that if you want to know what's happening and why, and if you don't have the time to investigate for yourself, the only real way to be knowledgeable is to read newspapers.


Let's start with some numbers, courtesy of Bob Greene's "Late Edition: A Love Story."

The first number explains something called "penetration," a number that describes what percentage of American households read newspapers. In 1950, that number was 123 percent.

Huh? How could it be 123 percent?

In 1950, not only did most households have a newspaper delivered, a large number of people subscribed to more than one paper. Maybe one was a big city paper and another a small local one, or maybe one came in the morning and another in the evening.

People had choices,. In 1950, most decent-sized cities had two or more papers. Big cities had many more. Cities with large immigrant populations often had more than one German-language paper, or Italian paper.

You get the picture.

The year 1950 was when television started sweeping the country. All of a sudden, when you came home from work to read your evening paper, there was competition from that little box. Reading began to decline, and not just newspapers.

Why read a book when you can watch Uncle Miltie, Sid and Imogene or that crazy redhead instead?

By 1964, nearly every home in America had a television set. Even so, 80.8 percent of adults still read a newspaper.

A lot of this was people just living the way they had always lived. But their kids weren't picking up the habit.

By 2007, the number had dropped to 48.4 percent, and much of that number came from adults 55 and older. Only a third of adults under 34 had the habit.

The penetration numbers were falling fast too. By 2004, only 49 percent of households were still getting a newspaper.

By then the second villain had come of age. The Gannett newspaper chain changed the business forever with the launch of USA TODAY in 1982.

All of a sudden, stories were much shorter, pictures much larger and layouts much gaudier. Stories that had been 500 words long were 150 in this new incarnation. It didn't even look like a newspaper, and of course all the real newspapers jumped to imitate it.

All through the '80s and '90s, more and more papers were failing. Most cities found themselves with only one paper and no competition.

Then the third and final villain showed up. There are certainly good things to be said about the Internet, but you won't be reading them today in this space. When people started reading newspapers online for free, all of a sudden it became far more difficult to sell advertising. And without advertising, budgets went all to hell.

Newspapers started cutting back everywhere they could and in some cases they lost their souls. One of the first things to vanish was hard-core investigative journalism. It just cost too much.

In fact, some papers gave in completely and started allowing sources to cover themselves. Sound horrible?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which used to be a pretty good paper, eliminated its print edition and went Internet only. The P-I cut its staff of reporters, editors and photographers from 166 to about 30. City departments it was no longer profitable to cover were invited to send in press releases the paper could use.

It didn't help that more than 90 percent of all US media was owned by a handful of corporations who saw no real point in competing when there was plenty of money to be made by sitting back and relaxing.

When big businesses own all the media outlets, you no longer get real news. You get a sanitized, corporatized version of it, and you never never never get news that questions capitalism or the so-called free market system.

It didn't help that putting stories on laptops, tablets, smartphones made it much less likely that people would read long stories.

Nicholas Carr's book, "The Shallows," points out that the more people use the Internet, the less likely they are to be able to absorb long stories or complex information. We truly are becoming shallower.

And as it becomes more and more difficult to think, we become more like the character in Drury's book who says simply, "It's too much for me. I just can't understand it anymore. I just try not to think about it."

And that means that the people who do understand it, who make a point of understanding it and try to think about it as much as they can, they'll do just fine. Especially with a media that cares a lot more about Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus than it does fracking or outsourcing jobs.

Say good night, America.

Sweet dreams.