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more and more consumers under age 35 are finding the traditional daily paper irrelevant to the lives.

Well the copy editors are bailing out anyway.

I work in newspapers (copy ed), and where I am now, the sense of futility is palpable. Nobody talks about anything but design, as if the colors, fonts and page packages are the only thing readers care about. As if readers view the paper from three feet away and never actually read the words.

Why do they do this? Because it's easy. It avoids the actual problem, which is that the newsroom is hopelessly out of touch and incapable of performing the "community journalism" it's always gushing about.

Most of our middle managers (well, not me ;-) ) live just to get away from real work altogether and attend their next design conference, or, ideally, get a full-time pontificating job at a place like the Poynter Institute, where they won't have to work at all.

Meanwhile the words of the paper consist of high-school level writing, wire copy that doesn't even know how outrageously biased it is, snotty leftist columnists snorting away, 1A "analysis" pieces trying to lie, spin and shape perceptions.

The old dudes are right to throw up their hands. Only I'm not an old dude. I'm 40. And it's the left that's to blame. They've effed up newspapers just like they've effed up publishing, art, Hollywood, schools, universities ...

Newspapers need conservative journalists more than anything. But they're all on the Web, it seems like ... End of Rant.

"Meanwhile the words of the paper consist of high-school level writing, wire copy that doesn't even know how outrageously biased it is, snotty leftist columnists snorting away, 1A "analysis" pieces trying to lie, spin and shape perceptions."

Thanks for the "inside scoop"! I'm glad it's not just my imagination regarding the the bias and low writing standards. (I'm actually kind of glad now that I didn't go into journalism as I had intended many years ago, it sounds like I would have been miserable!)

I thought I heard Rush say the other day that the WSJ nows generates more profits from their on-line version than their paper version (content is one and the same). I bought the WSJ everyday for 20 years, 2 years ago I canceled my hard copy version, the on-line is cheaper and I do not miss a thing.

Newspapers could revive themselves if they started to do true investigative journalism. A great example is the WAS State Govs election. If they dug in and uncovered the story, they would sell out every day IMHO.