Farhad Manjoo is writing a column with the subtitle "Facing a slow death, newspapers are desperately trying to reach young readers with dumbed-down tabloids full of stories about Kobe, Britney and dental bling"?!?! The same Salon that more often than not has been running an advertisement for ITSELF to gain a daily pass because it can't get enough mainstream advertising to pay the bills? The same Farhad that writes fluff pieces with little research then spends the next week overreacting to the posts where his lack of reporting skills are documented? The same website that regularly publishes Rebecca Traister's whiny diatribes and Ayelet Waldman's creepy, egocentric, starf**ker pieces?

I just checked the calendar. April 1st is over a month away. The URL line doesn't say www.theonion.com. Damn. They're actually serious. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Glad I'm not a passenger.

I applaud the New York Time's recent move to a paid online subscription for some its content (columnists, editorials, etc). Although, it bothered me at first, I do believe now that this is the only way they can continue to make money in the long term.

The 20 somethings that I know (myself included) simply feel more comfortable sitting in front of a computer to read news rather than with a clunky newspaper getting your fingers dirty.

I agree with the posters who point out that Salon is sliding down the same path implied in the kicker to this article. I'm not bothering to read the article itself, it looks like more of the hastily written, often shrill, and almost always boring commentary that has become so frequent in Salon these days.

Reminds me of the carping U.S. Trotskyists of some years back.

Clearly newspapers are still valuable. For example, everyone who read the Corpus Christi Caller-Times was privy to the fact that Cheney had shot a man, far before Salon readers were. And there was this gem in 2004 from an Ohio paper, that never got picked up by the national press (or Salon.)

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041013/NEWS03/410130378

If you'd lived in Toledo then, you would have known that the election was stolen. (But would you have cared?)

Anyway, all media is dumbing down, it's true. It's just a race to the lowest common denominator. And you guys are, sadly, contributing to it. Why don't you put away your trumpet, get off your high horse, and report some real stories like you used to?

Wow! I know you were just trying to make a very good point about the declining interest in newspapers, but that article was longer-winded than any story I've read about the failing war, poilitcs, or even scientific research for that matter. I guess some media outlets really do have trouble with being succinct... Did I mention I fall into that 18-25 demographic?

The writer's pointed analysis, especially of the New York Times, is certainly relevant, but not new. Unfortunately the paper of record is quickly running out of gas on that Information Highway we were promised. If only the promise had lived up to all its hype we'd all be better off. But the new "leaders" of the NYT decided to go less gray and more green, less in-depth coverage and more glitz.

They didn't anticipate something Vincent Canby and others were well aware of: American culture - movies, theater, fiction - had peaked by the early 90s. Nonetheless, the NYT management team felt compelled to cover new trends, like grunge, rap, hip-hop fashion, as if there was true substance and meaning. So the articles, and "analysis" got the old-fashion 2,000+ word treatment without the slightest hint of how empty the subject matter was. At some point readers, particularly young ones hip to the lack of essence, grew weary of writers like Pareles over analyizing pure crap as if it were Tolstoy.

Then came the weapons of mass destruction, which, somehow, Judith Miller insisted, through some form of heretofore unknown hypnosis via the White House, were grounds for war. And the paper was off and running with validation for the Iraqi war. Had the paper given that subject as much attention as it did subjects like, "Is Lime Green the New Black?", it would've proven its merit. But rather than lead, it followed. And then became virtually irrelevant. What news organization, or astute blogger sites, rely on tips by the NYT for their content now?

Outlets like Salon, which are far more open to criticism (just read these letters), aren't encumbered by that old layer of trying to turn out substance through the apperance of meaning. Like it or not, Salon has been a leader in supporting more enlightened approaches at the same time the NYT and other papers, seeing their reader base shrink, have grown more conservative in order to increase or at least maintain their circultaion numbers. The problem is, you can't do both. Once you retrench you lose an edge and then the entire enterprise seems closer to a cold call from a telemarketer as opposed to a brave guardian of all that's wise and wonderful.

It turns out that the youth may wear new styles, sport odd body markers, and dance more vertically than horizontally, but regardless of the outter symbols one thing never changes. Minds remain curious. Once you stop feeding them, or pretend to feed them with filler, they turn to where they can get better nourishment.

By the late 1970's, the NYT was written at what the time was called a 10th grade reading level, the WSJ at an 11th and the NY Post or NY Daily News, about a 6th. That sounds pretty dumbed down to me. What was different was the maybe the spread and scope of the content, but it was just as shallow as it is today.

One of the things which is not addressed in the article as much as it should be, is the increasing cynicism and discomfort that a lot of teenagers and twentysomethings feel towards Big Media. With an ever increasing monopoly, a shrill and thoroughly polarised columnist culture which has largely abandoned reason for empty pontificating and the horrible errors of judgement and pack mentality which continue to dog major news outlets (eg Whitewater and WMDs), is it any wonder that people of my generation have largely tuned out?

I graduated from journalism 3 years ago completely disgusted with the industry, and nothing in the last few years has changed my opinion of it. I still avidly follow the news, but when major reporters and outlets continually lie, cover-up and do every thing they can to bury stories which do not toe their publisher's line, it becomes difficult to tell people my age to follow major stories. Because of this, a lot of younger people realise that you have to read across a broad spectrum of media in order to make sense of the big issues. This requires a lot of will and time which, surprise, people just don't have.

We know that stories about Britney, Brad and Angelina are largely bull, planted by PR agents - but there is a certain comfort is being able to read these stories and not have to care that they are made up, or embroidered to a ridiculous extent. This becomes far more frustrating when you read a broadsheet or a tabloid reporting on a major story like Iraq and you know that what you are getting is being run through so many ideological, political and economic filters that it becomes difficult to believe you are getting anything resembling the full story.