I was happy to give up newspapers long ago because I wanted to spare the trees. My husband brought a paper home a few weeks ago and I pointed to it and said, "This is like seeing a wagon wheel or a buggy whip!" It's been that long and I'm only 37.

These days I thoroughly enjoy the Kevin Sites "Hot Zone" reports on Yahoo News. I learn more about people from around the world in his pieces than I do from an entire issue of the New York Times. That is the future of journalism, my friends. Interesting, personalized, relevant information ... maybe Salon should glom on to that "reporter-on-the-scene" model. It's a sort of mix between blogging (without the annoying self-absorbed, slapdash aspect) and journalism.

I like Salon a lot but I too hope you'll move away from that tedious Waldman-type crapola. (BTW I never thanked you for dropping that gawdawful sex column written by a hooker. Glad you found your sanity.) There is a world full of interesting people out there with stories to be told - please find them!

While we're at it, who is in charge of editing the Times these days? Not too long ago I saw a front page story on SUVs in which the plural was rendered as "SUV's" throughout. C'mon people ... not one reporter, not one editor, not one fellow at the "presses" noticed? We're talking about basic grammar!

One important the article totally ignores is that young people are increasingly divorced from the political process. The Press Corpse reports what the two parties want it to report. It's all part of a system that simply doesn't represent or understand young people or their needs. Maybe people who are of the boomer and previous generations are fooled by the Washington show, but we're not. That's precisely the power of small independent papers or for that matter John Stewart's Daily Show. It cuts through the bullshit.

The larger newspapers such as the NYT, LA TIMES, Boston Globe, Washington Post, et al, have op-editorial staffs made up of self licking ice cream cones. They write drivel to compete with (and complement)the drivel that their counterparts compose. Then they give each other awards.

Their editorials are so slanted and poorly written that most third graders would call bullshit on them, if they stooped low enough to read them.

If newspapers would allow a margin of 1 1/2 or 2 inches on the sides of their pages, perhaps more people would open one -- I don't like to touch newspapers since the rubber-based ink never dries and advertisers will often run ads with more than 50% ink coverage... which means a mess.

Besides that problem, there's really nothing worth reading in a newspaper -- I live in San Diego and the paper here is good for lighting my barbecue and nothing else. Dyed-in-the-wool staunch no-thinking "conservatism" that very few people can relate to.

Stale wire stories I read on the web a week ago, rah-rah editorials for the latest boondoggle some overly ambitious politician wants to bring about to benefit his wealthy corporate owners -- who needs it? It's like listening to NPR without quite so many pro-Israel stories.

If it wasn't for the sports pages, I imagine that few cities would even publish a daily newspaper.

Great article. Glad to see Farhad back. I was missing his writing. I was a little unclear whether the statistics cited at the top about declining newspaper readership are “platform-agnostic.”

I’m 38, so I don’t fall into the youth demographic, but I’ve been reading newspapers since I was 10 years old. I still do peruse a newspaper almost daily, but from the Web. The way I value journalism is that its relationship to power should be characterized by skepticism. Which is what brings me back to Salon just about every day,

And given what’s happened at the NYT, my values will keep me away from that paper forever. I subscribed for awhile to the Wall Street Journal because its news coverage doesn’t seen to suffer from the insecurity of historically “liberal” newspapers whose publishers and editors seem driven now to undermine their commitment to journalistic values to prove their “balance.” Paradoxically, you can get better truth out of the Wall Street Journal because it doesn’t have anything to prove (though its political coverage is deeply suspect). So dump your NYT subscription and go for the WSJ if you want a better approximation of the truth.

Another interesting point to my mind is how the web can detach us from the geography of a newspaper, yet we can stay readers. Though I now live in Massachusetts, the newspaper I skim on the Web is the SF Chronicle (mostly for columnists like Mark Morford who has a voice like no other). Unfortunately, since the death of newspaper competition in San Francisco, the quality of the Chron’s “news product” has tanked.

I think that in a newsworld milieu of largely undifferentiated crap what will determine which news source comes down to small details, like the columnists, the food section, or what topics do or don’t get covered. The Boston Globe seems like an OK newspaper, but education is a huge beat here and I just don’t give a damn about what’s happening at Harvard, Brandeis, Northeastern or MIT. My mother subscribed to the Chronicle for over 50 years. She saw the drop in quality of the paper, yet continued subscribing until she discovered that the Contra Costa Times had a better food section. Bye bye, Chronicle.

It doesn't take nearly five pages to analyze the death of newspapers, so I only barely skimmed this. I must have been in journalism school at the same time as Farhad Manjoo (I am also 27), and the consensus among a solid number of my peers there was that newspapers were already long dead. There is no such thing as a good paper anymore. Maybe the Financial Times is still solid -- maybe-- but it's a niche paper and it's based in London.

The New York Times, the revered Grey Lady, has proven itself untrustworthy again and again in the last several years. When the paper most valued by the bulk of the American newspaper-reading demographic has gone to hell, it can only drag the rest of the medium down with it. The pervasive media environment has made news a comodity. It's no longer enough to expect that people will read a newspaper because it is The Newspaper. You have to do something to distinguish your brand in order to sell anything, but papers are becoming more and more homogenized. Most dailies are owned by Gannett (or Knight-Ridder) and stuffed with copy from AP (or Reuters). Those are not brands that inspire the same loyalty as Coke or Nike. And the few papers that can trade on their own names, like the New York Times, are increasingly saddled with brand attributes like Jayson Blair and Judy Miller -- the reportage equivalents of finding a deep-fried rat in your chicken and a human finger in your chili, respectively.

Why would I pay money for a news source I know is full of spin payed for by the Republican party and colorful fabrication, when I can get the same bogus "news" for free from any number of sources? Left to my own devices, I can pick and choose articles, TV reports, and blogs that give a much more accurate picture of the world than I could expect to be fed by a single newspaper, even if I read every single word of that paper every day. Not everyone is such a discerning consumer of news media, but printing the paper in tabloid format and kicking up the entertainment coverage in the newspaper clearly won't fix that.

And, to be honest, another reason I've never personally subscribed to a print newspaper is that I can't stand the waste. Once upon a time I romanticized the crinkle and rustle of newsprint like a good journalism student, but the reality of it is that subscribing to a daily paper would double the amount of garbage that I personally produce in an average week. Reduce, Reuse, Read BBC news online.