Seth writes:

A friend of mine who works for one of these newspapers said that the end has been coming for a long time. In the early 1990s, if I remember correctly, the audience started to shrink. At the time, and for a long time thereafter, this was ignored. Had the problem been recognized back then it might have been possible, given a lot of time to experiment, to find a solution, a way to survive much longer. But now it is too late.

I don’t know about this. I’ve been reading for at least 10 years about the decline of newspapers. Newspapers and magazines have had a lot of stories on this topic for awhile. In the 1990s, the story was how daily newspapers were reducing the number of reporters because investors were demanding huge profit margins. Everyone understood that there were long-term problems; if nothing else, old newspapers were disappearing faster than new ones were being created.

So, I think lots of people did know about the problem–it was not being ignored. But it wasn’t clear what to do about it. “Time to experiment” sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice there was no solution available.