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Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.

What's good for each of us isn't necessarily good for all of us.

This column is prediction, not advice, so please allow a bit of self-indulgence: History will, I think, mark 2009 as the year the newspaper industry ended in the United States. It won't be the year the last newspaper is printed. Like Mike the Headless Chicken, who ran around for a year and a half after his decapitation, print news will linger for awhile. Its demise, however, is assured, the victim of:

• Narrowcasting: The marketplace has now fully satisfied our shared desire to receive only information that validates our opinions, while avoiding everything else. Liberals watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Conservatives watch The O'Reilly Factor. While many of us can stomach neither, very few can stomach both.

   

  Newspapers are for those who want both perspectives (or, rather, who want well-informed, well-reasoned perspectives presented by thoughtful analysts, if any still exist).

   

  I began reading newspapers in the Chicago suburbs back in the 1960s. They covered the news broadly, creating a shared understanding of what was happening. And while conservatives tended to read the editorially compatible Tribune, liberals the Sun Times, and moderates the Daily News or American, I remember few discrepancies in how they reported the facts. Their editorial pages were a different matter, which was where the discrepancies belonged, and even there, all four provided a wide mix of columnists.

   

• Craig's List: I've been told that when industries fail, it's often due to mistakes made a decade or more before the symptoms first appear. In the case of daily newspapers, the failure to create an on-line version of their highly profitable classified advertising wasn't an oversight. It was a conscious decision, made in the mid-1990s.

   

  By then, newspaper executives were already conditioned to making decisions appropriate for a "mature" industry (mature being a euphemism for slowly shrinking). The aggressive, competitive instincts of Hearst and Pulitzer were matters of history, not role-modeling, and so, presented with an opportunity to invade and win a new marketplace, the industry responded with timidity rather than entrepreneurship.

   

  Which is why Craig, TMP Worldwide, Autotrader.com and their brethren ... not newspaper companies ... dominate on-line classifieds.

• Good manners: In Abraham Lincoln's day (if Doris Kearns Goodwin is to be believed), adults considered politics to be among the most interesting topics of discussion. As a result they read the news avidly.

   

  We've now decided discussing politics is bad manners, and avoid any exchange of views.We already prefer narrowcasting. Our good manners eliminate any residual interest in the information we would otherwise need to hold our own in political discussions with our friends and neighbors.

• Loss of competition: When each major metro area had a dozen newspapers to choose from, a scoop was worth real money. It caused people to buy your paper, thereby increasing readership, thereby increasing ad revenue. And so, newspaper owners spent money to get good reporters.

   

  By the time the Watergate scandal rolled around, already there was little financial benefit to be gained from investigative reporting -- it was a matter of nostalgia, not competitive advantage. For the professional business managers who now run most newspapers, nostalgia doesn't pay the bills.

   

  Which, in turn, means there's less reason than ever to subscribe to a newspaper.

• Increased competition: Long before the Internet, broadcast news carried stories at 6pm, making the morning newspaper literally yesterday's news. Newspapers never truly adapted to a world in which most of their competitors were in a different business than they were.

• The Internet: Of course. The Internet makes news publishing a real-time activity. And, it puts newspapers head-to-head with CNN and Fox. But where CNN and Fox have stable revenue sources from their broadcast operations, newspapers have bupkis, and on-line's banner advertising just isn't going to pick up the slack.

• The Kindle: Electronic books aren't yet a factor. They still have too many formatting limitations, and too few consumers own them. They are the final nail in the coffin nonetheless, because they're the difference between reading at a desk and reading wherever you're in the mood to read.

The newspaper industry is dead, and none of its replacements will provide the in-depth, objective, investigative reporting we need as informed citizens. The factors that led to its demise were, for the most part, good for each of us. The result, however, isn't good for any of us.

Copyright 2009, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.

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