Sadly we live in a country where the most read items are the tabloids and TV Guide. For a lot of people, the only time they pick up a newspaper it's only to read the classifieds or the funnies.

If they wrote as if they were educated past junior high, educated people would continue to buy and read newspapers and advertising wouldn't be dropping like flies. These days they just write to the lowest common denominator of the public.

Agreed Fluffy tee. I am so agreeable today!
The last newspaper I subscribed to, I discontinued because they ran a heroic front page article about a local sports hero who died as a result of wrapping his car around a tree when he couldn't take a hairpin turn at 75 MPH. This happened around 4AM. The poor guy, who hadn't seen his family in 2 weeks, was so depressed upon returning home after his team lost a critical game, that he went straight to a teammates house to drink away his sorrows. This drinking his sorrows away part was not mentioned by the paper until a few days later when the toxicology report came out and showed his blood alcohol content to be over twice the legal limit. The paper addressed this in a tiny 4 inch article buried on page B12. They originally blamed the accident on the road being too dangerous and the county having not addressed the issue long ago.
What made this even worse was the the same night some illegal immigrants crashed their car in much the manner. This was also on the front page. The paper did not hesitate to stress that "alcohol was believed to be involved."
I later found out their subscriptions took over a 30% down turn after this. I was pleased.

You can read most papers online now. Why do I want to pay to have someone throw a paper on my lawn? Especially when they always seem to get them stuck in my bushes or the gutter? Save some trees. I was being all green there at the end.

I still like to get the newspaper delivered into the flowerbed right beside my front porch. (My paper delivery person is no marksman.)

For heaven's sake, what else will I ever line my birdcage with, or use with my windex to get that beautiful, streak-free window?

OK, nerdy response time. My fiance is a producer for a media site, which has a B2B relationship with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Both NOLA.com (his company) and the T-P are owned by the same holding company.

Despite the fact that the T-P's circulation is following the national trend of collapsing ever faster, the T-P staff is passive-aggressive as hell. Instead of embracing the online medium, they fight it like Puritanical punks arguing that porn causes Mad Cow (and so on). It's a constant struggle between two forms of media who seem unable to collaborate.

Frankly, online content is what will save a newspaper's overall profitability. Hell, even the Washington Post has gleaned this - they've diversified their holdings to the point of creating an entirely new corporate culture by garnering their revenue largely from Kaplan.

Also, if there are no more newspapers, what am I supposed to hide behind, looking busy/disinterested while eavesdropping on conversations all over town?

It's a lot of work getting all the juicy details.

A busybody needs her props.