The Decline of Western Civilization

Progress and technology are great things, but at what cost do they come into our lives?

Not sure if you’ve heard about this recently, but more and more American newspapers are putting their final print editions to bed and either folding completely or becoming only an online entity.

The latest casualty in the newspaper industry is The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which produced its last print edition today after 147 years of serving the greater Seattle, WA, community.

Click here for an excellent, in-the-trenches account of the PI's last deadline day from one of its reporters.

The PI's Carol Smith writes a great eulogy and historical account of the paper here.

As a former newspaper reporter, I find all of this incredibly sad. Honestly, I had never heard of the PI until today, but I was just as sadden and unnerved to peruse (online, ironically enough) it's final edition and read about its staff, a handful of whom will be staying on to produce the online-only version of the paper.

Maybe this makes me sound old, but I don't care ... I like having a physical newspaper to hold. To this day, I read (virtually) cover-to-cover the entire Sports section of the Boston Sunday Globe ... not online, but on my couch, or in the kitchen or on the porch when it's warmer. For me, there's something very gratifying about actually holding the paper in my hands, the crinkling sound of the paper itself, smelling the ink on my fingers after I put it down. It just feels right ... walking out onto the porch and grabbing the paper every morning.

It genuinely saddens me to think that print papers are rapidly becoming dinosaurs and will likely one day go the same way these ancient creatures did.

And if newspapers aren't stopping the presses entirely, they're at least in deep trouble, to whit: the New York Times and The Boston Globe announced recently huge revenue losses, the Christian Science Monitor will release its last print edition this year, New Jersey’s Newark Star-Ledger is laying off half of its news staff, and the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News have both drastically reduced their staffs over the past year.

When you stop and think about it, though, it's not really that surprising that newspapers aren't what they used to be. The explosion of the internet certainly was the death knell for the newspaper. It's too easy to fire up the 'puter and get all the news that fits. Hell, you don't even need a desktop or a laptop, news is a click away on most cell phones now.

But, given the current economic climate, ad revenues for all print media is rapidly declining. Have you noticed how thin magazines have become over the past year? My wife just received the latest issue of Oprah magazine and I was genuinely shocked at how thin it is. And just the other day I saw in the pages of The Boston Globe a huge white space where an ad might have been.

Still, all this begs the question ... will my 4 1/2-year-old son know a world in which a newspaper is delivered to his front door or will his be one of only online news?

UPDATE: The news continues to get worse for the nation's dailies.