UPDATE: Going, going, g...

"'Print is dead,' Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November." - from an article in Saturday's Washington Post on the decline of newspapers, "Hard News."

Hey maybe they’ve been reading Lex and know that the cancer is growing and it’s only a matter of time. They being the media bigs whistling past the blogs and the 24 hour news cycle. Well if they do know, they are not reacting as if they have a fighting chance. Like the cancer patient who gets the bad news from his doctor and chooses to forego the pain and expense of a series of, in the end, useless operations and radiation therapy and instead opts for a good bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes.

In one sense the media has come full circle. There was a time in America where every big city had several large newspapers. They came out morning noon and night. They even printed “EXTRAS” - the print equivalent of the Fox News ALERT. Today most major cities have a single newspaper. Like the post office that used to deliver mail twice a day, the newspapers’ only answer to falling circulation is to reduce service and raise rates. We grew up with the three big networks that reported the same news every night which eerily matched what the New York Times was covering.

We’ve come full circle now because the internet allows us to check news headlines and most of our personal mail at our convenience. Cell phones, palm devices etc. allow the same access. Text devices keep us appraised of everything our group of friends are interested in 24-7, as in, “U heer ‘bout J-Lo? C Fox. C U l8er dude:)” You can even get up to the minute run downs on sporting events, but because sports broadcasters are, in the main, still apolitical, we’d rather watch live. So we’re back where we started with access to multiple sources of news morning, noon and night.

What’s going to happen when broadband goes satellite and wi-fi world-wide? Is that the sound of a trumpeter warming up for Taps for the old media? I think it is.