Michael Kinsley has a mildly amusing piece up on Slate about the quaint/absurd process of reading your news on dead trees. But while the pulping, printing and delivering those trees to your doorstep mor local deli might be papers' most obvious anachronism and thus the most vulnerable to parody, the insitence on sustaining this process isn't why papers are in trouble. It's a tradition that will die hard (and one I'll miss), but a new generation of managers won't cry as they shutter presses and instead send subscribers proprietary newsreader PC tablets or the like.

Still, it's what has changed at papers that's nonetheless proving the most resistent to the kind of change that's needed now, namely the content. Over the decades. papers have variously cut story length, narrowed and widened and narrowed again their range of coverage, added bylines, reporter head shots and bios, expanded sports coverage, shrunk foreign news coverage, closed bureaus, shifted from staffers to stringers or no one at all on some beats, done total redesigns, gone from broadsheet to tabloid, etc., etc. Newspapers are not resistent to change as long as it happens within the existing hierarchy of "We report, you listen." And that's the one change they're mostly unwilling to make. And it's that unwillingness, not an insistence on sticking with ink and paper, that's driving away readers.