Rogers Cadenhead introduces some uncomfortable reality to the people moaning about the death of newspapers:

Saunders blames the web and ideologically motivated haters for the demise of newspapers, but she ignores the fact that major dailies have been dying for decades, long before the Internet came along. Back in the '50s when Saunders was a child, the legendary journalist A.J. Liebling devoted numerous New Yorkerarticles to the sad demise of major papers and the societal hole that each left behind when the presses rolled to a halt. The industry has been dying for as long as many of us have been alive. Multiple newspaper towns became two paper towns, morning and afternoon. Two-paper towns became single-paper towns, usually when one paper killed the other. I can still remember where I was on Dec. 8, 1991, when I heard the news that the Dallas Times-Heraldhad been bought for $55 million and immediately shut down by the rival Dallas Morning-News. When a paper dies, a sizeable chunk of its readership doesn't move to another paper. People just break the habit. Even though half the reporters in town were gone, I don't recall any stories in the Newsback then lamenting the stories that would never be written.

When I first moved to the Baltimore area back in the late 80's, there was a morning paper, and an evening paper. The evening paper, which had far better comics, died soon after I got here, and - as Rogers says - I just didn't bother getting the morning edition. That was a long time before the internet popped up.

There are problems with newspapers, and the death of printed classified ads is making their lives more difficult - but the downward trend started a long, long time ago. What the net did was tilt the ramp.

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