I sense little grief from libertarians at the possible extinction of newspapers. It’s the market — and anyway, except for the Orange County Register, newspapers have not been notably libertarian. A thought arises: “Then to hell with newspapers.”

         I’m a newspaperman, and I don’t feel that way. The daily paper where I worked for 16 years, Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has stopped printing. It was not a great paper; it didn’t have enough people, and only some of them were really good at what they did. I knew many of them. Now, apart from a handful still at the P-I’sweb page, they are gone, and the city is the poorer for it.

         Since 1983 the Post-Intelligencer had shared printing plants, delivery trucks, advertising, and revenues with the larger Seattle Times and split the pot under a “joint operating agreement.” In the 80s this had been a way to save the P-I and make money for both owners. It changed after 2000, when the Times switched from afternoon delivery to mornings in order to avoid daytime traffic congestion. The result of the two papers’ sharing the same time slot, and of all the other things going on, was a slide in P-I daily circulation from 195,000 to 114,000. Revenue sharing spread the pain to both of them, and in the past year it has threatened to sink them both. 

         Struggling to stay alive, the Seattle Times had two rounds of buyouts and layoffs in 2008. Until January 2009 there had been no cutbacks at the P-I. In January a Hearst executive flew out from New York and announced that the paper had lost $14 million in 2008 (which works out to $80,000 per employee) and that unless a buyer stepped forward, the paper would stop printing in March. On March 18 the P-I’s red coin boxes stood empty.

         Of the five publications I’ve worked for in my career, three have stopped printing, one is for sale, and the fifth, where I work now, has shrunk its staff in an effort to survive.

         The major cause of all this is not the bête noire of libertarian and conservative critics, liberal bias. That malady does exist. But what is one to say when libertarian economics prof Bill Anderson bellows (LewRockwell.com, Dec. 31, 2008) that “there is no entity in this country that is more statist than the typical newspaper,” or when libertarian economics prof Walter Block proclaims (LRC, Oct. 6, 2005) that the typical newspaper business page says “that taxes and welfare payments must always and ever be increased.” I’ve worked on newspapers for 30 years — and I had to be a hell of a lot more careful with what I said than these guys are.

         Steven Greenhut of the Orange County Register is more accurate when he says (LRC, Jan. 23, 2006) the typical chain newspaper is imbued with a “bland left-of-centerism” — with the emphasis on “bland.” The Seattle P-I was like that. Its editorial columns were left-liberal but not stridently so, and left-liberal assumptions might be found in some of its feature stories and columns. But the P-I’s core market, the city of Seattle, is at least as lefty as it was; the city voted more than 80 percent for Barack Obama and elects the left-wing Jim McDermott to Congress. The P-I’s reputation as a liberal paper did hurt it with part of its market, but that was the smaller part.

         There are stronger reasons than bias for the decline of newspapers. One is the decline of reading; video has lowered Americans’ attention spans. Another is the rise of a new kind of reading, on screens. In the 1990s newspaper management decided to provide content on the internet for free. The salaries of reporters and editors were already covered by the newspaper’s advertisers. The internet paper required no pressmen or truck drivers, and though there was some fixed cost, the incremental cost of a new reader was nearly zero. “Free” fitted the internet ethos, and it was good marketing.

         But that was a fateful decision. Newspapers’ internet sites have inexorably gained readers, while their dead-tree product has lost them. Yet the dead-tree product paid for the reporters and editors. Now the printed newspaper weakens, and it can carry fewer employees. News executives thought that by now the internet would carry the weight, but it hasn’t. Google has taken the great share of internet advertising because it tailors ads to match search requests, and newspaper sites can’t. Google brings users to newspaper sites, but — from the newspapers’ viewpoint — it collects too much of the ad revenue.

         An even more important result of the internet has been the newspapers’ loss of classified ads. The metro daily I work for used to have pages and pages of ads for jobs, houses, cars, and garage-sale goods. We charged a steep price for these ads, and they accounted for 40 percent of our ad revenue. In today’s paper, as I write, the classifieds have shrunk to one page, plus four columns of public notices. The classifieds have shrunk to the same space as the paid death notices.

         Much of the classified business has gone to craigslist. I met the famous Craig at a dinner once. His business card did not identify him as a corporate CEO but simply as “Craig Newmark, customer service rep. & founder.” He is a short, soft-spoken man who writes his company name and job title in lowercase letters. He denied to me in a tone of innocence that he is the carnivore eating my industry’s lunch, but he was trying to be nice. He’s killing us by offering a classified-ad service that works better than ours and that costs most of his customers nothing.

         Better product, price of zero: What are you to do?

         Maybe you do something else.

         Maybe you go out of business. The printed Seattle P-I folded in March 2009. Denver’s no. 2 paper, the Rocky Mountain News, closed on Feb. 27. In Michigan, the Ann Arbor News said that it will go internet-only in July. Time printed a list of the ten other U.S. newspapers most likely to implode, and the list’s major failing was that it left out too many names.

         Every year newspapers shrink — in the width of pages, the number of pages, and what’s in them. The sports section stops covering high-school games. The business section drops the stock tables and second-tier public companies. Book reviews are discontinued. The rock ’n’ roll critic retires. The consumer-complaint columnist dies and is not replaced. The political cartoonist is laid off. The letters editor goes on medical leave. The travel editor takes a buyout.