-30-

"-30- is what journalists used to type at the bottom of their stories when the story was over. It was the journalistic equivalent of the cinematic “The End”. Yes, particularly of newspapers. This book is an anthology. But it is an especially well-crafted anthology that reflects the writing of some of the best short-form writers on this subject, including David Carr of The New York Times , Jack Shafer of Slate , Michael Shapiro, who now teaches at Columbia University, and Ken Auletta of The New Yorker. The book surveys the field by doing case studies. Some of them are functional — about readers or circulation — and some of them publication-specific, about The New York Times , The Philadelphia Inquirer , The Los Angeles Times or The Chicago Tribune . It gives a very, very strong portrait of where we have come to in this decade and how we got there in the two or three decades before it. Jack Shafer’s piece on the Newspaper Preservation Act [of 1970, which exempted newspapers from certain antitrust laws], the mergers and disappearance of a whole raft of American newspapers 30 to 40 years ago, was, I thought, very smart. America used to have a substantial multiple of the number of newspapers it has now, and part of what happened was all the afternoon newspapers disappeared. There was a time when the afternoon papers were stronger, then that shifted. Many of them merged with the morning papers. The upshot of all this is that people have been talking about the sky falling for newspapers for 40 years now. One unfortunate consequence is that when it actually starts to fall people miss it, or underestimate the danger, because they feel like they’ve been warned about it too many times. It’s the story of the boy who cried wolf. I do. I don’t mean this year, or in the next five minutes, but sooner than people would be inclined to believe. If the metering works, The New York Times is as well positioned to make the transition as any. The bar is getting higher in terms of quality of content, which plays to the Times ’ strengths. It’s the run of average papers that are going to be in the most serious difficulties. Particularly if charging for online content turns out to be the test – and I think it likely will be. It’s already clear that readers will not pay for most content. Whether they will pay for particularly excellent content remains to be seen, but I think there is some reason to hope that they might."