I believe that newspaper reporting is less investigative and more entertaining or pleasing than it used to be and it might mirror the views of the editors at all of the cable news channels which construct the hours they must fill with video clips that fit in 3 minute blocks and along with 6 minute commercial breaks comprise all of the hours they are trying to fill. So anything alarming or radical that requires a period of time longer than three minutes to explain completely, are viewed as things should be used as specials and can be hyped and advertised before they are aired. And the same with the print.

Then when something sensational airs or is printed and the cable news people adopt the story and beat the horse not until it is dead, but pummeled into dust and if it is juicy, then they beat it until all that is left is DNA.

It seems to me that the decline, with rare exceptions, began with the smallest local weekly papers. In many areas of the country, non local owners came in and stripped a great deal of the local reporting out (which was often done by low paid but dedicated local people). USA Today then came on the scene and turned what was marketed as a national paper into something akin to a high class tabloid. The decline of the big city papers starting with the demise of the more detail oriented afternoon papers. And the city papers eventually started declining sometime thereafter. I'm not sure of the time line of all of this, maybe someone has written a book about the story, but this was not a trickle down phenomenon, it was a bottoms up phenomenon. The smallett papers were degraded first and now we are seeing the death of the finest papers in America. Even the NY Times and Washington Post aren't immune anymore and I don't even need to mention the large papers that have folded. And I'm leaving out the many eras prior to the time I can remember anything about it. My analysis is just based on personal observation as I was about 14 and no longer a delivery boy when the afternoon paper I delivered died. But about the time that was happening was when outside owners came in and started buying up the small town local papers. If it began before that, it's earlier than I can remember.

A book detailing the history of how and why this happened badly needs to be written if one has not already. The pace certainly accelerated recently but the internet no doubt gave the coffin its nails.

But Pincus seems to be focusing on a few papers and not seeing the big forest of the whole story of the decline and fall of the newspaper because he is a concentrating on few trees, the great redwoods, of which he is intimately familiar. I do know of some small town newspapers who've won prizes for best local reporting when the paper itself is a shell of its former self, even in the small towns. Maybe his premise extends down to the lowliest of papers but that's not the whole story. I think he may be over emphasizing the importance of that phenomenon.

But Bill Doolittle is much more qualified to comment on this than I am, although we each have a local view of the areas of the country we lived in and it's hard for one person to fit all the details together. Only a good book written by a first rate research might suffice, but I suspect this is the kind of book that would take years of investigation to report what happened on a national level, both from a macro and a micro level of detail.

The story of what happened to radio is another book.

Or a TPM Muckraker U.S. Attorneys sort of thing, with so many people contributing so many dots that the dots can then be connected, and a picture appears.

I think it's greed, owners who want to make a killing rather than a living.

Joyful is right. Mostly it is greed that destroyed local newspapers long before the internet came along. When newspapers converted from hot to cold type their expensive back shops were eliminated. The huge savings could have been spent beefing up the local coverage and circulation, Instead, for the most part, the savings went to the owners, who then sold their papers at high multiples to chains. The chains squeezed hard to their recoup their investments. So most local newspapers were so weakened when real competition challenged their monopolies, their fate was sealed. Even so, though, I believe the internet would have destroyed their monopolies at some point. Readership was falling fast long before the Net became a force. Now, slowly, there will develop new competitive voices across the country, and we will all be better off.