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Simple SimonWhat the auteur of The Wire doesn't (and does) understand about the newspaper business.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 6:27 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Simon fails to appreciate that the newspaper no longer enjoys the centrality to American life that it had through most of the 20th century. In a sympathetic but critical piece about Simon in the Atlantic, Mark Bowden quips that when he worked at the now-defunct Baltimore News-American, everybody joked that "people didn't read our newspaper, they played it." The News-American and every other newspaper had number and word games, scores, racetrack results, TV listings, comics, coupons, and other diversions. As entertaining as a newspaper is, it can't compete with a cell phone, he observes.

Newspapers also exploited what former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler calls EPILIT, short for Entertainment (or Editorial) and Perishable Information Leading Indirectly to a Transaction. As long as newspapers could situate themselves between customers and their transactions and had little competition, they thrived. Need a car, job, apartment, or used lawnmower? Looking for a deal at the local department store? The daily newspaper was your destination. But free online sites—Craigslist, Monster, Cars.com—ended newspapers' classified hegemony.

The 20th century rise of the advertising-dependant department store helped create the modern newspaper, and their decline paralleled that of the newspaper franchise. When I first moved to Washington in 1981, multipage ads from Garfinckel, Hecht, Raleigh, and Woodward and Lothrop choked the A section of the Washington Post on an almost daily basis. Today, all of these stores are gone, as are their advertising dollars. The same story has played out in practically every U.S. market, leaving only Macy's Inc. (Macy's and Bloomingdale's) standing. See Wikipedia for a long list of departed department stores.

The size and character of cities change. Retail and advertising patterns change. And technology changes. No title in the American newspaper has been left untouched by these recent upheavals. Even the Washington Post and the New York Times—controlled by Zen masters who acknowledge only the highest news values—have cut coverage, features, and staff. Those reductions, while nowhere as drastic as the Sun's, stem from the same pressures facing Baltimore's last daily. If Simon wants to be consistent, he should reload and take aim at Graham and Sulzberger.

Simon actually gets the last point, writing at the close of his Post article that maybe the Internet made "retrenchment and loss" inevitable at newspapers. If he really believes that, then all his carping about the Baltimore newspaper tragedy sounds hollow to my ears.

******

Forgive me for cannibalizing this previous column. You'd have done the same thing if you were me, only you'd have done a better job of it. Meanwhile, I wonder what sort of dramatic series could be spun out of the life and times of a Web magazine. Send your ideas to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Charts' source: Newspaper Associate of America.
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