This time from Matthew Yglesias who writes that:

People should also recall that a cat­a­strophic col­lapse of the news­pa­per indus­try would hardly be with­out prece­dent. The real hey­day of American news­pa­per­ing came in the late 19th and early 20th cen­turies when the United States fea­tures a lit­er­ate pop­u­la­tion and no broad­cast media. The rise of radio and tele­vi­sion had a dev­as­tat­ing impact on the indus­try and caused mas­sive shrink­age in the vol­ume of papers. This shrink­age then led to what jour­nal­ists con­sider the hey­day of Americanjour­nal­ism when the indus­try had fallen so far that most papers faced little-to-no com­pe­ti­tion and could serve as author­i­ta­tive “objec­tive” sources of infor­ma­tion. We’re now once again amidst and era in which tech­no­log­i­cal change is going to kill off a lot of exist­ing busi­ness mod­els. But all this has hap­pened before, and all this will hap­pen again.

While the sim­ple fact that a decline has prece­dent doesn’t mean that we should dis­re­gard the cur­rent decline in print jour­nal­ism it is nonethe­less impor­tant when we read doom and gloom arti­cles about the cur­rent state of the news­pa­per indus­try. The idea that Yglesias brings up in his post (i.e. that money ought to be invested in non-profit media insti­tu­tions) is a good one, and hope­fully one that phil­an­thropists like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates will lis­ten to.

Ultimately I see the even­tual decline of print jour­nal­ism as inevitable. Over the past decades soci­ety as a whole has sim­ply moved toward more image-based and more frag­mented modes of con­sum­ing infor­ma­tion. This can be seen with the rapid growth of the tele­vi­sion and then the inter­net. Both of these medi­ums encour­age peo­ple to digest news in short blurbs and bursts and do not require the time that read­ing news­pa­per arti­cles does. Overall, I think that a vast per­cent­age of soci­ety has been con­di­tioned to not have the atten­tion span needed for read­ing through the New York Times or the Atlantic Monthly. It’s too bad, but I fear it’s true.

Read the orig­i­nal arti­cle.