Here's a gloomy new book

"-30- The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper" is a compendium of 15 mostly gloomy views of what's happening to newspapers, what can be done about it and why you should care about newspapers -- or about how you get news at all.

Editor Charles Madigan, a wonderful writer and former Chicago Tribune columnist, and the other authors present disparate views, but a few things seem clear from this book and from my own half-century in print journalism:

• Economic troubles of newspapers are both real and imagined. Profits are headed south in the face of Internet competition, and some newspapers even have lost money. But papers have been wildly profitable, and, as professor and researcher Philip Meyer writes in his own book excerpted by Madigan, "The problem is that there is no easy way to get from a newspaper industry used to 20 to 40 percent margins to one that is content with 6 or 7 percent."

• Great journalism doesn't flow from nonjournalist, profit-driven investors. Reporters "wonder whether their editors have sold out journalistic values for business ones," says Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian. Indeed, in many cases, they have.

• Whether newspapers survive makes a difference far beyond jobs lost and readers inconvenienced. Only newspapers have the infrastructure -- 300 journalists at the Star Tribune alone -- for in-depth coverage of news that helps shape the civic agenda.

The book's statistics are grim. Only 37 percent of U.S. adults said that they read a newspaper daily in 2000, down from 53 percent a decade earlier, and only 20 percent of adults under 35 read now.

The authors' list of causes is long and varied, including Internet competition for readers and ads; sleepy owners who didn't invest in research and development; big money, tax laws and disinterest that prompted journalism families to sell out (the book was produced before the sale of the Wall Street Journal was announced); boring stories; failure to reach out to young readers, and left-leaning reporters who (gasp!) went to college.

Also, owners trying to cut their way to profitability, of course. "As papers become increasingly shallow and niggardly, they lose their essentiality to their readers and their communities," says Gene Roberts, whose Philadelphia Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes during his 18 years of editorship there.

Book Details:
ISBN: 9781566637428
Subtitle: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper
Author: Madigan, Charles M.
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Publication Date: September 7, 2007