The headline is old newspaper lingo for “end of story,” and with this post I’ll end my discussion of the decline and fall of newspapering and move on to more important topics, like the Festival of Zappadan, which commences tomorrow.

In comments, James chides those of us who prefer taking our news online to paying hard cash for the daily fishwrap, noting that journalists deserve to be paid for their work, like anyone else providing a product and/or service.

But readers have never “paid” for their papers — the price of a newsstand copy or even a subscription doesn’t begin to cover the cost of ink, much less of newsprint, presses, computers, reporters, photographers, editors, wire services, delivery systems and so on. Newspapers and magazines depend upon ad sales for the bulk of their revenue, and these days ad dollars are going elsewhere, along with the readers. One of the magazines I work for is budgeting for a flat year on the print side and a boom year on the web, because that’s where the eyeballs are.

Why is this? In part, immediacy. When I got my first newspaper job, in 1974, it wasn’t uncommon for a paper to publish more than one edition per day. By the time I quit, in 1991, that sort of thing was limited to the occasional “special edition,” run off in response to some particular triumph or tragedy. And where TV once followed our lead, we had begun watching TV in the newsroom to see what The Big Eye deemed newsworthy.

Today, everyone’s hooked into the Intertubes, a 24/7 information source that makes TV seem quaint and newspapers prehistoric. Plus it’s free! All you need is, um, a computer, software, a wireless card, a wireless-ready DSL or cable modem, an ISP. . . .

Newspapers and magazines alike were late to respond to this most recent incursion onto “their” turf, particularly when it came to devising revenue models and deciding how to drive traffic from print to online and online to print. What goes where, and why? Is online merely a promotional device, intended to serve old-style journalism, or is it The Next Big Thing?

Well, we know how that turned out. Today’s reporter is as likely to pack a video camera as a pen and pad when he or she races off to cover a story, and the news item may appear first online, as a video clip, podcast or blog, and the next morning in print as a traditional newspaper story.

And that brings me to the second half of the equation: Quality, as determined by management’s myopic focus on the bottom line to the exclusion of all else in the face of a changing environment.

When I started in newspapering, Linotypes, manual typewriters, blue pencils and paste pots were the tools of the trade. Reporters reported and wrote. City editors and their assistants oversaw reporters’ work and ensured continuity in coverage. Copy editors edited copy and wrote headlines under the supervision of news editors, who laid out the pages, and slot men, who were the last gatekeepers before copy left the newsroom for the composing room. Wire editors compiled the wire-service offerings, some of which were localized to make them more relevant to the readership. A newsroom was full of specialists — the police reporter, the business editor, the photo chief.

With the advent of computerization, however, this began to change, and rapidly. The production side took the first hit — no more Linotype operators, printer’s devils or engraving rooms — but the newsroom was next. Copy editors began taking on typesetting functions in addition to editing and writing headlines, and by the time I left my seventh and final newspaper job it was not uncommon for a rim rat to be editing copy, writing headlines, designing pages, paginating them (this being the process of assembling a page — flowing text around ads, adding photos, cutlines, info boxes and what have you) and finally proofing them.

Something had to give, and in my experience it was the quality of editing that suffered most. Poorly conceived, badly reported, ill-written and casually edited copy slipped past us and into print while we were bogged down in the minutia of production, and there was no time for strategic thought about improving the ways we covered and presented the news. It’s worse now, with reporters, photographers and editors expected to blog about this and that in addition to their other chores, all while responding gently to e-mailed screeds from the tinfoil-beanie whackjobs who formerly annoyed only the editorial-page editor.

Too, chains were expanding and staffs were contracting. Good reporters and editors are expensive, more so than wire services, and a lot of Metro sections were (and are) getting filled up with regional Associated Press copy, which never takes vacations, sick leave or smoke breaks. Some chains repackage copy from this paper as copy at that paper, neglecting to tell the reader that his “local” fitness columnist is in fact writing some 1500 miles away. Others have formed story-swapping partnerships with out-of-town papers, as have the Gazette and the Rocky Mountain News. All are shedding staffers like a dead dog does fleas.

The upshot is that many newspapers have become defective products, failing to deliver the goods — timely, informed coverage of the news, especially local news. And I try very hard not to reward incompetence by paying hard-earned money for it.

Frankly, I suspect that most readers of newspapers stick by them out of habit. They’re probably older, like me, with longer attention spans and accustomed to the feel of a paper in the hand as they push their eggs around the plate. But we’re not gonna be around forever, and neither will newspapers, not in their present form. The outfits run by smart people will focus on local news and devise some synergy with online to feed both ends of the operation and keep the younger, hipper readers. The ones run by bottom-line dummies will go away.

Postscript: This isn’t entirely academic for me, as you may suspect. VeloNews croaked Winning through, among other things, increased frequency of publication. Winning was a monthly color slick with a long lead time; VeloNews was a mostly black-and-white newsprint rag that came out every other week. You’ll notice your local newsstand is short on copies of Winning these days. Now, of course, VeloNews faces its own timeliness crisis — the explosion of cycling news on the ‘net — and it is retooling to make the transition and survive in the digital age. Ironically, the feature-driven mag now looks not unlike Winning while the news-oriented website looks more like VeloNews. So it goes.

Postscript 2: It could be worse.

Postscript 3: It is worse: They’re laying off the cartoonists, including Brian Duffy at the Des Moines Register.

Lots of interesting comments on my newspapers post — seems lots of you still crave your morning moment with the daily snooze, even if it’s not what it once was.

I feel your pain; the last time I read The New Mexican in Santa Fe (another former employer), I felt as though I had stumbled across an old pal who had suffered a crippling brain injury. The Gazette here in Bibleburg is similarly impaired, if today’s edition is any example.

Above the fold, just one story — the “news” that the United States has been in a recession since last December, with a terrible headline — topped by a fat teaser to the sports section for a story on Lance Armstrong’s comeback. Both items were history rather than news, having been beaten to death earlier by the Intertubes and TV. The number-one column is given over entirely to teasers, 14 of them, plus a weather bug.

Below the fold, another bit of history (President-elect Barack Obama’s national-security team, ho hum); a locally produced feature on a rodeo cowboy, teasing the 50th National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas; and a locally produced piece about plague croaking black-tailed prairie dogs in the Comanche National Grassland in southeastern Colorado. I predict that press-association awards will prove elusive.

The rest of the A section is given over to national and international news, a graphics-heavy calendar-slash-website-teaser page and two pages of neo-libertard opinion where one would suffice. And it only goes downhill from there. The Metro section is just four pages, heavy on the police beat, and includes four stories from outside the metro area. The three-page Business section has one local story. Ditto the Life section. The Sports section has more local news than Metro, Business and Life put together.

The final insult is the comics page. Same ol’, same ol’, most of the strips as fresh as the dead guys and barely ambulatory geezers who conceived them decades ago: Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Hi & Lois, Peanuts, B.C. The few bright spots are Frazz, from my buddy and fellow VeloNews ‘toonist Jef Mallett; Zits, drawn by Jim Borgman, whom I remember as a top-notch editorial cartoonist; and Dilbert.

The local economy is perhaps best reflected in the Classified section, which is all of six pages, including two full-page ads (King Soopers and Heuberger Subaru). Anyone who plunked down 50 cents hoping to find a job in this bad boy is shit out of luck — just 17 jobs are on offer, most in construction, maintenance or sales.

Is it any wonder that the locals are tuning this thing out in droves (and that nationwide, newspaper ad revenue fell nearly $2 billion — a record 18.1 percent drop — in the third quarter)? What does this brief examination of a single issue tell you about Bibleburg, besides that the town’s lone daily is owned by out-of-towners who are more interested in cutting costs than building readership?

Back to you, Katie.