The newspaper, in the sense of news actually printed on actual paper, is clearly in its last days. The content of a newspaper can be delivered online at far lower cost than is required by investment in printing plants and equipment, fleets of delivery vans, labor, paper, and ink. With fewer people buying the paper product, big advertising accounts have drifted off to TV and glossy magazines and smaller fry have signed up with Google AdSense, while classifieds have migrated to Craigslist and Monster.com. The print edition New York Post I have delivered daily is one of two tabloids, circulation half a million each, serving a city of over 8 million. The only big firms with full-page advertising in today’s copy of the Post are two local discount appliance megastores and the utility company. There are just 75 classified ads, not counting 16 legal notices.
With print newspapers as with poor humanity, the Angel of Death comes in many forms. He came most abruptly to the English Sunday tabloid News of the World, which published its last edition on July 10 after 168 years in print. The News of the World had been the most serious offender in the phone-hacking scandal that, at the time of writing, seems set fair to engulf all of British public life, from the Royal Family to the Football League. The leaders of the parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, administered a coup de grâce to the wounded beast and left its corpse on the battlefield in their long retreat before the forces of law, public outrage — among those whose phones had been hacked were murder victims and British soldiers killed in action — and leftist Murdoch-haters.
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