Travel Blog

At the annual meeting of travel editors in 2005 one of the speakers was a 20-something blogger who, at the beginning of his talk, announced that he never read a newspaper. This statement - less a confession than an audacious boast - produced an almost audible gasp among the assembled editors, most of whom were former reporters who had spent a good part of their lives in newsrooms.

This morning, the NPR show The Takeaway is asking listeners: "When was the last time you picked up your local newspaper?" In seven years, apathy toward newspapers has gone from a shock to the norm.

The Internet, of course, is doing newspapers in. It's faster, more efficient (as long as you have a computer and a connection), and more capacious. But it's depressing watching newspapers not just wave the white flag but eagerly accelerate their demise by laying off good writers, smart editors, deft copy editors. If people aren't reading newspapers today it's in part because newspapers have nothing left in them that's worth reading. The death of newspapers is a murder/suicide.