Are Newspapers Doomed?
Posted: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 at 1:17 am ET

Joseph Epstein, one of my favorite literary essayists, offers a fascinating look at the decline of daily newspapers in "Are Newspapers Doomed?," published in the current issue of Commentary. A sampling:

Much cogitation has been devoted to the question of young people's lack of interest in traditional news. According to one theory, which is by now an entrenched cliché, the young, having grown up with television and computers as their constant companions, are "visual-minded," and hence averse to print. Another theory holds that young people do not feel themselves implicated in the larger world; for them, news of that world isn't where the action is. A more flattering corollary of this is that grown-up journalism strikes the young as hopelessly out of date. All that solemn good-guy/bad-guy reporting, the taking seriously of opéra-bouffe characters like Jesse Jackson or Al Gore or Tom DeLay, the false complexity of "in-depth" television reporting à la 60 Minutes--this, for them, is so much hot air. They prefer to watch Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable channel, where traditional news is mocked and pilloried as obvious nonsense.
The rest-Albert Mohler