For those who love newspapers - to read them, write them and rail at them - these are somber times.
Metropolitan dailies face rising costs, falling share prices and declining circulation - 2.6 percent in the last six months alone. American papers have shed more than 1,900 jobs since the beginning of the year, industry publication Editor & Publisher reports. The mammoth Knight Ridder Corp., which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and 31 other newspapers, is on the auction block, and there might be no bidders.
Newspapers are one of the glories of modern Western civilization. They have, on the whole, probably never been better written, edited and produced than they are today. But their future is in doubt.
So, is this the twilight of printed news? Should the scribes of instant history be hunting-and-pecking their industry's obituary?
The answer is probably no. "I've never been a believer that print will die," said technology writer and blogger Edward Cone of North Carolina. "I think print has a lot of advantages. It's a useful form. It's profitable, it's disposable, and you can roll it up and hit the dog with it."
But the nation's daily newspapers are certainly changing fast, and to understand their future it may be useful to glance at their past.
H.L. Mencken - reporter, writer and iconoclast - was perhaps the most influential journalist of his age, as big a star in the 1920s and early 1930s as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, NBC's Tim Russert and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly rolled into one.
Mencken's name, of course, will be forever linked with three things: his newspaper, The Sun; his magazine, the American Mercury; and his mammoth scholarly work, The American Language. But he began his career and made his reputation as the sage, seer and iconoclast of the Jazz Age by writing columns in a genre that has almost become extinct: the evening newspaper.
After working at The Sun, Mencken wrote "The Free Lance," and later a Monday column, for The Evening Sun for the better part of three decades.
The publication, launched by the publishers of The Sun in 1910, was often confused with its sister morning paper. But for much of its history The Evening Sun was a completely separate newspaper, with its own staff of editors and reporters and a distinct identity.
Evening newspapers were more than just separate publications. They practiced their own style of journalism, one that suited Mencken's love of raising hell.
Morning readers tended to prefer their news straight-faced and serious. Afternoon readers were different. They wanted to be entertained rather than educated, preferring news of crime, sports and local politics, spiced with strong opinions.
The afternoon papers ran many editions, updating stories throughout the day, getting the stock market closings and the racetrack results in the final edition.
Journalism in the afternoon flourished until after World War II, when it was weakened by changes in demographics, technology and the American economy.
Evening papers bore the brunt of competition with the upstart technologies, radio and television. No longer were they the place to go for the latest news.
There were delivery problems too. As Americans moved to the suburbs, trucks trying to deliver afternoon papers got snarled in rush-hour traffic.
By the 1990s, there were few cities with more than one major daily newspaper. It was the morning papers that survived. (The Evening Sun closed in 1995, not long after merging its staff with that of The Sun.) The near-extinction of evening newspapers was the single biggest reason behind the long-term decline in circulation, according to a 2004 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
But just as most evening papers had vanished, new technologies revolutionized news delivery again. The Internet appeared. Computers flooded into homes and offices. By the beginning of this year, most homes were wired for high-speed Internet service.
Today the technology is in place to deliver up-to-the-minute news stories to millions of readers all day for next to nothing. Written news is certainly in demand. Americans are so hungry for it, they have started to produce it themselves in the form of Web logs, or blogs. The Internet giants Google and Yahoo have created Web sites that gather and repackage news from newspapers and wire services around the world.
Newspapers have slowly, fitfully, but inevitably changed in the face of the new competitive pressures. "People don't get their news from the newspaper anymore," said Cone, exaggerating slightly.
With the task of delivering information in so many different hands, today newspaper readers get far more analysis, features and commentary than before. Increasingly, the paper provides context and spots trends.
Now the Internet has given newspapers the chance to compete again in the breaking-news business. For once, the written word has an advantage over television and radio. Most office workers would find it awkward, to say the least, to sit around watching television or listening to the radio. But they can read. And many with access to the Web check the news there periodically all day.
According to an August study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, almost three-quarters of Americans who go online say they read news there.
And these readers follow an interesting pattern. According to studies in the United States and Britain, Internet users tend to check the news shortly after arriving at work in the morning, then look for updates every couple of hours - especially just before lunch and before heading home.
Web editors say readers look for stories about crime and politics, about local neighborhoods and communities, local sports and entertainment.
In other words, they're hunting for the kind of news once found in evening papers, exactly at the times of day that once were the edition deadlines of those papers. In fact, newspaper Web sites increasingly have come to resemble their vanished afternoon brethren, albeit in electronic form and loaded with bells, whistles, blogs and podcasts.
Major newspapers in search of an all-day audience are publishing multiple versions of breaking stories: short ones to slap on the Web as quickly as possible, longer ones for readers who have time to leaf through the paper the next morning.
Increasingly, editors and writers will likely tailor articles to this Web audience, with its short attention span and hunger for novelty. The pieces will, perhaps, be more like blogs: punchier, more irreverent and provocative. They may resurrect a more freewheeling era of journalism.
The physical daily paper, Cone and others say, seems likely to survive to set the scene for the day's breaking news. But it's the Web - rather than television or even radio - that will provide the news junkie with his instant hit.
So, is the death of traditional newspaper journalism nigh? That depends on how you define it.
It may, in fact, be on the cusp of a second golden age. And somewhere in newspaper heaven, H.L. Mencken may be chortling, along with his brethren on the many departed afternoon newspapers.
