Entry 3:

It's painful to watch the demise of a city daily. We went through it in 1995 when Times Mirror shut down New York Newsday. (Prematurely, I still believe: The paper had already broken even and in today's economy would probably be adding millions of dollars a year to shareholders' profits.) On the other side, I correctly predicted five out of the last zero deaths of the New York Post.

As you've indicated, newspaper competition is often better in theory than in practice. I remember visiting a friend last year at Mother Jones who had a front page of the Chronicle reproduced on her office bulletin board. One story was about marijuana consumption; another about chocolate. She had written: "Slowest news day of all time" on her copy, but from what you say it sounds more like business as usual. Still, whatever the Chronicle's weaknesses, it seems unlikely that eliminating competition will make them better.

As for the New York Post, it's still kicking, and usually kicking Hillary Clinton. Today's front page: "WHAT HILLARY DIDN'T SAY/Author: She skirted issue of sex addiction in interview."

It seems entirely possible that anti-Hillary stories could take up three-quarters of the front pages of the Post between now and Election Day 2000, in a city where the all-but-declared-candidate first lady is reasonably popular. That political truncheon gives you some idea of why Rupert Murdoch keeps the money-losing paper around. But then, since Fast Company's owner is Murdoch's chief competition, maybe the less I say on this subject the better.

I can't say I liked the Kuczynski piece much. The article quotes Esquire editor David Granger blaming, among other factors, the Internet for the putative inability of magazines to engage in real debate. This fuels my theory that the Internet is becoming to the late '90s what crack was to the late '80s--a catchall explanation for everything that goes wrong in a particular sector. Crime up? Must be crack. Circulation down? Must be the Internet. Magazine editors don't have a clue about what readers really want? Gotta be the Internet.

I admire Granger for turning his magazine around somewhat when everyone else was ready to apply embalming fluid. But for him to assert--and for the Times to accept--a causal link between the Net's rise and Esquire's decade-long tumble is ridiculous. The decline of the general-interest magazine has been with us for a lot longer than Kuczynski or Granger have had a login and password. Unfortunately, the reasons--increased number of titles, declining newsstand sell-through, etc.--are often very dull, and so it's much easier just to blame the Net. (To be fair, the Times piece does mention other forces, but I still find it an unambitious mishmash.)

Not that the Net doesn't change things. Just turn the page to find the story about Cisco Systems investing a billion dollars in KPMG, the accounting and consulting business. The New Economy taking over the Old: Now, there's a story for a magazine that wants to engage readers.