I remember reading news papers in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically they were a mix of actual news articles (typically copied verbatim from agencies like AP, Reute

I remember reading news papers in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically they were a mix of actual news articles (typically copied verbatim from agencies like AP, Reuters, and national equivalents), some original reporting from their own journalists, and a lot of filler content, opinion pieces, cartoons, etc. With lots of ads. The original reporting and opinions was why you bought a news paper. The actual news would be stale by the time it hit your doorstep but it still had some value because news spread slowly. As soon as news started being distributed online in more or less real time, the shelf life of news articles reduced to zero. And since that stuff is basically being tweeted out in a gazillion different ways, the value dropped to zero as well. That also affected original content. Because the second that's published, people will extract the essential facts and write about that online. The whole point of original reporting was that it was exclusive to the publisher for long enough that readers had no choice to get the information in a timely fashion by buying the paper. That time window went away. As soon as you publish something, the essentials are being reported on by world + dog. In a matter of seconds. You can be well informed without ever buying paying for a news paper. So that left news papers in a place where they were basically distributing old news with low value bundled up with some filler content. The filler content could go on a blog or in a magazine just as easily. And a lot of it did not have a terribly large audience to begin with. Most people didn't have time to read news papers cover to cover. Google helped accelerate this process but they did not cause it.