Seems like the same old story in new clothing: the internet and craigslist destroyed the jobs of those poor little old honest, hardworking newspapermen. This i

Seems like the same old story in new clothing: the internet and craigslist destroyed the jobs of those poor little old honest, hardworking newspapermen. This is a very sexy narrative, especially for newspapermen, but I think it's a false one. The problem hasn't been ad dollars, the problem was that newspapers survived largely because they were a medium and because they had a sort of monopoly on a communication channel that people had come to rely on. The reality is that newspapers had not been doing a particularly good job for a very long time. The conceit is that the office at a newspaper is a buzz of journalistic activity. The reality is that it was mostly drudge work, just going through the motions to ensure that classified ads, lazy PR puff pieces, marmaduke cartoons, and regurgitated wire reports got churned out day to day. The kernels of quality, original reporting, investigative journalism, have typically been very tiny even at the best newspapers of the 20th century through today, and completely absent at many others. It's foolish to believe that people didn't notice, that the public doesn't care because they are just a bunch of uninterested, unsophisticated louts. The news media spent decades methodically transforming themselves into a useless, valueless tabloid media caricature of themselves. It's shocking that some of the best journalism in traditional media being done today is being done by comedians. But the narrative that newspapers are dying due to no fault of their own remains firmly entrenched, and for that reason I don't expect them to be able to claw themselves back from the abyss they've found themselves in.