How a Newspaper Dies
The many aspects of newspaper readership decline are very neatly summarised on Wikipedia:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Decline_of_newspapers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Decline_of_newspapers</a><p>I grew up delivering newspapers door to door first thing in the morning with yet more newspaper delivering in the afternoon, after school, this one being the local paper. I got to be very good at reading all of them and I was a believer in the product. My papers of choice were the Financial Times and The Guardian. I started out reading the smaller articles at the foot of the page and progressed to reading the big articles at the top of the page.<p>Sometimes a &#x27;child mind&#x27; is quite helpful for being objective and seeing things as they are. I was truly shocked at how low the reading age was for the tabloid papers - up to and including the Daily Mail. I also found The Times to be &#x27;faking it&#x27;, i.e. using big words for the sake of it rather than to convey meaning. I found The Telegraph to be legit but with Tory viewpoint which was fine, you didn&#x27;t have to read the editorial, if you wanted crime stories they were all there on page 3, the international news was there and the sport, e.g. cricket was pretty good too.<p>There were some howevers, for instance I was quite a fan of F1 at the time so after a race I was reading the reports in all of the papers, I can even remember the writer names. I didn&#x27;t want to know about just the winners on the podium, the fortunes of the back of the grid guys interested me too, yet the only way I could get a bit of an idea of how they fared was to read all the papers. I still found this lacking.<p>Nowadays if I need to know that level of information I can get so much more and for free, reading blogs and whatnot as well as the BBC overview. There is no way I would consider reading what the newspapers have to say about F1 even if I had access to every newspaper for free, even if online rather than in dead tree format.<p>There was another &#x27;however&#x27; - as a child delivering papers I did not think outside of the frame set by the newspapers, so if there was a story on how the British bid to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia hadn&#x27;t happened then I would &#x27;believe&#x27; that this was bad for jobs and the balance of payments - as if that mattered. I was not able to think that &#x27;we&#x27; (as in the Royal &#x27;we&#x27;) should not be selling tanks to the Saudis. The Guardian (never mind the Daily Mail) didn&#x27;t let my mind stray as far as questioning whether selling these tanks was ethical or outside of the founding charter of the United Nations. I was not given the words to think that.<p>Back then the wars that happened seemed pretty legit. Even the Falklands seemed &#x27;fair&#x27;. The war in Afghanistan and the Olympic boycotts that followed all seemed okay.<p>If we had the internet then then I might have been able to find out that the Afghanistan war was instigated by America, funding the terrorists and bringing down a democratically elected government. Much like the F1 situation, the information was just not obtainable, even if you went out to seek it.<p>My grandmother did say that you should not believe what they write in the papers, but the other out there stuff was not there so the default was to believe what the papers said.<p>Nowadays, post Iraq, post the Syria fake chemical attacks and with so many other obvious lies told how is anyone expected to believe the truthiness of the papers? So as well as the many reasons for newspaper decline given in the Wikipedia article is a fundamental problem that means no mainstream newspapers have a core readership of &#x27;fans&#x27; - truth. It is just absent from the mainstream news. We as a society are no longer on the same page when it comes to facts.<p>Online blogs do have the &#x27;1000 core fans&#x27; needed to give them life, the mainstream news does not have that. In the UK the printed newspapers are only read by two groups of people - commuters in tube trains with no WiFi and the old baby boomer generation.<p>I learned how the &#x27;old baby boomer generation&#x27; read their papers back in the day of delivering them. They read these things much like how one might eat lots of &#x27;fiber&#x27; in one&#x27;s diet, because it is allegedly good for you. There would be sugar coating in the Sunday magazine supplements, so people would actually be &#x27;licking off the sugar coating&#x27; and reading the lifestyle or sport articles rather than the &#x27;news&#x27;. So they weren&#x27;t really reading papers for reasons beyond entertainment. This goes on today, it is the same ritual, something to fill your lazy Sunday afternoon doing. So nobody is reading these papers and even if they are then their thoughts and opinion on current affairs matter not. They have been sheeple-ified into believing the five minutes of hate with no ability to think outside the frame.<p>A lot of &#x27;young people&#x27; who don&#x27;t touch newspapers with a bargepole are not illiterate oafs, chances are they have cut the cord with TV and really do not want to be told what to think anymore. Sadly they get drawn in to fake news and conspiracy stories thanks to Facebook and what the likes of Cambridge Analytica do. So we still have not escaped &#x27;the frame&#x27;. We have escaped it enough though for dead-tree newspapers to be as good as dead.