A Sound of Morning Silence Comes to Atlanta
The familiar sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in Atlanta’s residential neighborhoods is fading away. By the end of this year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution will join a national trend and cease publishing print editions. The once-common ritual of turning trees into paper, marking it with ink, and transporting it for delivery is becoming a thing of the past—soon to be as forgotten as men lugging heavy slabs of ice for home iceboxes.
This decline marks the waning of a 400-year era of newspapers, but it reflects cultural shifts far more significant than the convenience of digital media. According to The Economist, the proportion of American adults who read for pleasure has dropped by 40% over the past 20 years. Parallel to this decline is the diminishing ability of students to read extensively while comprehending the material. An Oxford English professor observes that students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks,” while another professor notes a scarcity of “habits of application and concentration.”
The nature of reading is changing as well. Sentences are becoming shorter and simpler. The Economist cites an analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers revealing that sentences in popular books have shrunk by almost a third since the 1930s. Readers today—if they can be called that—are often wired for brief snippets, such as 280-character tweets, and struggle to grapple with dense classics like Charles Dickens’s *Bleak House*, which spans 1.9 million characters. This raises a pressing question: can people who find sophisticated prose challenging comprehend advanced political ideas?
Yet, sophistication is increasingly absent from journalism, which is shifting alongside what Andrey Mir, a Canadian media scholar, describes as the “retribalizing of society.” In his concise 2020 book *Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers*, Mir, a self-described “media ecologist,” explains that the media lost their agenda-setting power with the rise of the internet and crowdsourced news priorities.
Advertising revenue, once the financial backbone of newspapers, has migrated online. Newspapers that used to be funded “from above” by selling readers’ attention to advertisers are now funded “from below” by selling themselves directly to readers. This shift has encouraged readers to view subscriptions more as political donations than simple commerce. Subscribers partake in “slactivism,” outsourcing activism through “donscriptions” — subscriptions framed as acts of donation.
Mir points out that “the last newspaper generation” was born in the early 1980s, coming of age alongside the internet. Journalism soon stopped aiming to inform citizens and started focusing on agitating them. The new business model thrives on polarization, amplifying readers’ irritations and frustrations to keep them engaged.
Reflecting on Lenin’s words that “a newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organiser,” Mir notes, “Americans consume media 12 hours per day. Counting weekends, this is twice as much as a full-time job.” Faced with insufficient news, the emphasis has shifted toward expertise, commentaries, and opinions.
Prestige newspapers’ membership models function as validators. Readers value the newspapers’ attitudes and stances on events—not the basic news itself, which they are already aware of. Financial and emotional predisposition become prerequisites as readers are encouraged to make donscriptions. The primary task of reader-funded newspapers is to justify their subscribers’ agendas and instill those views in others who may also become donors.
Mir describes the “commodification of the Trump scare” as completing journalism’s transformation from “making happy customers” for advertisers to “making angry citizens.” The challenge for postjournalism now is to identify what scare will succeed this one. The shift from rationality to emotionality — “peddling intensities,” as Mir calls it — has made negativity essential.
An example from the New York Times website on May 14, 2020, reads: “Almost 3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week. Although the weekly tally has been declining since late March, experts are warning of a long struggle ahead.” If there were a key on today’s journalist’s computer, it would print: “experts are warning of.”
Mir also notes that the emotional tone is visible even on TV hosts’ faces: “In the 1970s, TV anchors had to wear smiles; now, they are obliged to wear an anxious grimace. Today’s news anchors make a kind of ‘basset face’ that would have looked unprofessional on 1970s TV. An anchor with a ‘corgi face’ from the 1970s would look like an idiot on today’s news show.”
Time flies. Until the 1840s, information could travel as fast as trains—about 35 miles per hour. Today, however, the actual information matters less compared to the opinions that accompany it. These opinions are distilled into attitudes that are performative and compete with each other through escalating shrillness. This has led to a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon: the velocity of stupidity.
As newspapers vanish from print and reading habits change, society faces profound questions about communication, comprehension, and the very nature of informed citizenship in the digital age.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/oct/18/george-f-will-how-trumps-advent-and-the-internet-k/
