Another take on newspaper decline

This guy is a "buyout baby" (and a screeching liberal with a bad case of BDS), but he makes a few good points:

When I came into the business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive Linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.
Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels and more and more frequently Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced. . . .
The tsunami of buyouts at the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other big newspapers have not bolstered their stock prices (which plummeted an average 37.7 percent in 2007) or slowed the erosion of ad revenue and readership.

The print newspaper will not become extinct, but for the most part, major metro dailies have already ceased to be the thick, content-heavy glories they were two decades ago. Even if there were still enough ad revenue to justify a 32-page A section, the evisceration of newsroom staffs means that most newspapers are unable to fill those pages with fresh news content. If extra pages were available, they'd just be filled with wire copy.

Ultimately, as I've said before, the decline of newspapers is a consequence of declining literacy. People no longer read as a pastime; now, they watch TV or play video games. The less time people devote to reading, the less market demand there is for written material, regardless of the format. Journalism as an industry -- including online journalism -- cannot escape this fact of shrinking demand for the written word.

The prospect is bleak. As a newspaper editor buddy of mine said recently, "In 10 years, this business is going to be run by 18-year-old girls with cellphone cameras. 'It's on MySpace! Hee-hee-hee!' "