To survive, newspapers across the country are cutting staffs, the size and content of their editions, and regular delivery to customers. This is akin to a struggling restaurant trying to survive by serving increasingly lousy food to the dwindling number of fools who patronize it. Hardly a formula for success!
Journalists offer various preposterous excuses for their troubles such as the following:
(1) Readers are moving on-line and abandoning the printed page. Well of course they are since the newspapers themselves are reducing their print editions in favor of on-line editions in order to cut costs. Like duh!
(2) Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer fingers public ownership and the greedy free market. Back in the good old days when rich families owned newspapers, she writes, journalism prospered. Nowadays papers are public corporations that shareholders and investors expect to be profitable, a state of business affairs Ms. Geyer thinks incompatible with the high calling of news gathering. Ms. Geyer doesn't consider the reason that rich families sold their newspapers might be that they were money-losing turkeys run by spendthrift editors and journalists who didn't give a damn where the money came from as long as they got a regular paycheck.
You and I know better because we've read the National Adult Literacy Survey. We savants know that the reason fewer and fewer Americans read newspapers is that more and more Americans lack the reading skills necessary to read them. If you can't read a newspaper, why buy it unless you need to line a bird cage or you have a puppy not yet house-trained? Newspapers are going bust because American literacy has gone bust.
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