Newspapers

Lately there have been a lot of media types discussing the impending doom of the newspaper industry, bla, bla, bla. I hear radio shows about it, books are being written about it, you name it. What really gets on my nerves is that the young consumer is constantly being blamed for the newspapers' predicament. This young consumer is, as they put it, hugely interested in getting the news, but he/she is getting it from online sources now. Well, sorry, but you can't be blaming me for your business model. Make a better product. something. I mean, I look at my local paper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, and I can hardly find one reason for reading it. Sorry, but I could care less about the local sports scores, and that is probably the only thing the paper does better than a bigger, more internationally-known paper. You're not going to be seeing who won the Hanover Horton vs. Grass Lake basketball game in the New York Times. But, then again, who cares about that stuff outside a small number of coaches and players, and maybe friends and family?
The fact of the matter is, the economy determines what is and isn't a viable product, and some industries end up dying off. Sometimes, it seems tragic, but in the end, we're all better off. Look at Kodak. They were the camera behemoths, until new, better technology came along and rendered these old-school cameras virtually obsolete. Little kids know instinctively that, if you take a picture, they want to look at it and see how it looks. We didn't have that when I was a kid. Look at the Detroit automakers. They've been making crappy, expensive models for some time now, and now they have done major, major downsizing. But in the end, if we get off our gas guzzlers, maybe our children won't have to be constantly fighting oil wars in the Middle East and Asia for the next 100 years.
So too with the newspapers. They will need to adapt, or collapse. The strong will survive, and the crappy ones will die, probably. As of right now, it's only old people who read most local newspapers, and once they die out, you can say bye to your local rag, pointless high school sports scores, and the crazy guy who writes letters to the editor twice a week.