Talk about your dumbing down. It has been coming since the newspapers began begin bought by corporations. This is even sadder than the prospect of a Trump for president. Where will we be with that combo. (Yeah. just shorten every word to a cutesy one and voila! You get clicks and the corporations get their votes and their money for which they pay little if any taxes.

Self driven chaos into oblivion.

But, thank you, Ronni--what you provide is concise, pointed and relevant gatherings of information. Where else are we going to get that kind of thinking?

In going to estate sales this past year, some of my most interesting finds have been old newspapers. Most have been from the period of 1930's - 1990's, but some have been much older. A recent find of a scrapbook including articles from the late 1800's was very interesting in the depth and eloquence of many of those articles. Even the society pieces were a pleasure to read. Today, our daily newspaper takes me less than five minutes to get through. If I read the ads, it would take much longer, but I mostly disregard those. Even the much bulkier Sunday paper takes only about ten minutes, and still is mostly fluff. Thank goodness for easy access to other news sources, including this one.

My first job was at a local weekly too, which I fell into from being an "observer" at New England town Selectmen's meetings for the League of Women Voters. (Remember them?) I went on to bigger newspapers, a city magazine, and eventually corporate communications and speech writing, but what I learned as a local reporter has stood me in good stead over all the 50+ years since that first job. It makes me crazy to hear people talk about "the media" as though it were a monolith.

Hear, hear, John Oliver.

I worked in newspapers during my career, and I've seen journalism rise and fall in public regard. During the Watergate years, the public was forced to notice how journalists could uncover corruption at the highest levels, and suddenly every young person aspired to be an investigative journalist. Back then, there were editors who wouldn't print anything until it could be independently verified by at least two sources. These days, I'm told by people still working, there's so much pressure to be first that you go ahead and post something with the idea that if it turns out to be wrong you can always fix it later. I was appalled to learn this.

My local paper has its faults, but it has the great fortune to be locally owned by a family who still believes that making money isn't the only reason to be in business. I read a lot of what's in it, and there are many important stories I don't see elsewhere. Unfortunately, it's also true that my local ain't what it used to be; there have been big staff cuts because of the loss of ad revenue.

There are multiple reasons why newspapers are in bad shape, and John Oliver touched on many of them. I believe that corporate ownership is among the worst of those reasons, because corporate ownership brings jerks like the guy in Oliver's story who used the f word on his staff because they preferred news stories to puppy stories. Corporations, which are increasingly taking over our lives, only care about one thing--making money for their shareholders. They think of newspaper readers as customers who need to be satisfied rather than citizens who need to be informed. I believe it was on Oliver's show that I learned six companies control nearly all the media outlets in our country. Think about that for a minute.

What really depresses me is how politicians blame the media for everything and get away with it. When I hear people say that, I always remind them how crucial a free press is to democracy, and I tell them the deterioration of the media is at least in part because of corporate ownership, not because journalists are biased and arrogant. Fox "News" (I always put quotes around it) isn't news; it's corporatespeak directly from the mouth of Rupert Murdoch. The real-life newspaper reporters and editors I knew toiled doggedly day in and day out for not a lot of money because they believed in the importance of what they did.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now. But I think journalism is a noble profession, and it sickens me to see what is happening to it.

I have to admit I get all my news online these days. Have done so for many years. The world has changed. Barriers have fallen. There's no going back to the days of print-only.

Sometimes I think guiltily that I really ought to subscribe to this paper online, or that one, or that other one over there, especially when I hit a subscription wall for an in-depth article that looks like it would be excellent. But when you live among web searches where results can come from anywhere in the world... if I start that, where do I stop? I can't afford to subscribe to every online paper that momentarily catches my interest.

This is a problem without an easy solution. Local papers aren't just local any more. People who live online receive stories from around the world through multiple news aggregators, from Google News... to, in a very specialized way, Time Goes By! No one news source has a large enough share of anyone's attention to be worth paying for. We can't fix that basic structural issue by wagging a finger.

We can rage against the corporate owners, and yes, their attempted "solutions" are terrible - but the fact remains: journalism done right costs money. Where is that money to come from?

Here in the Twin Cities of MN we have a right of center St. Paul paper and what used to be left of center Mpls paper. Enter a local Billionaire to buy the Mpls paper and now both of the papers are right of center in story emphasis and Opinion Page. Really sucks. So after many, many years of subscribing to both newspapers, I'm going to the web. Print media is gone in this area.