• Free Press (Creators Syndicate), Friday, March 24, 2006 11:30 AM

Molly Ivins, the plain-speaking syndicated columnist, has written an acerbic piece about the state of her beloved newspaper industry.  First of all, she abhors all the hype and misinformation about the decline of papers.  Sure, she acknowledges, they're losing readers and advertisers. But slowly, not overnight.  Most papers still make money.  You wouldn't necessarily know that, she writes, if you simply read the recent headlines, especially those about the sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy. Even if they eventually die altogether and all news shifts to the Internet, the newsgathering business would still have its challenges, Ivins says. In her words:  "So we're looking at a steady decline over a long period, and many of the geniuses who run our business believe they have a solution. Our product isn't selling as well as it used to, so they think we need to cut the number of reporters, cut the space devoted to the news and cut the amount of money used to gather the news, and this will solve the problem. For some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful to people. I'm just amazed the Bush administration hasn't named the whole darn bunch of them to run FEMA yet." A typically insightful column by Ivins.

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