Opinion – How media lost power in the age of Trump and the internet – The Washington Post
Opinion
By George F. Will
What killed print media — and what died with it
The waning of newsprint is about cultural changes more momentous than digital publishing’s arrival.
October 17, 2025, 4 min
A stack of local newspapers at a mail sorting station in Colbert, Georgia, in 2022.
(Dustin Chambers/For The Washington Post)
A sound of morning silence is coming to Atlanta. The sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods will vanish when, at year’s end, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joining a national trend, stops publishing print editions.
Turning trees into paper, marking it with ink, trucking it to people who deliver it to readers — soon this laboriousness might be as forgotten as men with tongs lugging large slabs of ice for home iceboxes. The waning of the 400-year era of newspapers is, however, about cultural changes more momentous than the efficiency and convenience of written words presented digitally.
The Economist reports that the share of American adults who read for pleasure has fallen 40 percent in 20 years, and students’ ability to read in quantity, with comprehension, is in parallel decline. An Oxford professor of English says students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.” Students lack, another professor says, “habits of application and concentration.”
The sentences that are being read are shorter and simpler. The Economist says an analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers “found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Readers, if they can be called such, who are mentally wired for driblets of 280 characters cannot cope with Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House” (1.9 million characters). Can people unable to decipher sophisticated prose manage sophisticated political ideas?
But sophistication is not in the repertoire of journalism devoted to what Andrey Mir, a Canadian, calls the retribalizing of society. In his epigrammatic 2020 book “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers,” Mir, a self-described “media ecologist,” says the media lost agenda-setting power when the internet enabled crowdsourced agenda-setting.
As advertising dollars migrated to the internet, newspapers, which hitherto were funded from above by selling readers to advertisers, became funded from below by selling themselves to readers. Newspapers encouraged readers to think of subscriptions as donations to political causes. Subscribers enjoy their “slactivism,” outsourcing their activism through “donscriptions” — subscriptions thought of as donations.
Mir says “the last newspaper generation” was born in the early 1980s. It came of age as the internet did. Soon journalism stopped being about informing people to make them citizens, and began to be about making them agitated.
The new business model depends on polarization, amplifying readers’ irritations and frustrations. “A newspaper,” wrote Vladimir Lenin, “is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organiser.”
“Americans,” Mir says, “consume media 12 hours per day. Counting weekends, this is twice as much as a full-time job.” Because there is insufficient news to fill the time, emphasis has shifted to “expertise, commentaries, and opinions.”
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
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