Hey, I link to Conservatives once in a while. I probably don't agree with Rod Dreher about how Liberal some newspapers are or were. Right-wingers have a tendency to see bias every time the news doesn't go to their liking, and to see plain, old-fashioned bad reporting as deliberate sabotage. But I agree with his main thesis, which is that there's probably nothing newspapers could have done to avoid the massive drop-off they've had in importance and circulation…and it isn't just the Internet. It's paper that's the problem.
Print media is atrophying in this country and has been for a long time. As I keep pointing out in panels about the sales decline in the comic book industry, Playboy has nose-dived in sales and it's not because men have lost interest in photos of beautiful nude women. Interest in Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, etc., has never been higher but it doesn't translate into hordes storming the comic book shops and buying their adventures in that format. The Iron Man comic sold a lot better back when most people had never heard of the character.
Dreher says that at one time, he thought newspapers could thrive by being less Liberal and more Conservative, as witness the success of Fox. I think they might have done a bit better to go more in either direction — to become truly Liberal newspaper or Conservative newspapers. This possibility probably didn't occur to Mr. Dreher because from his vantage point, anything to the left of The Washington Times is ultra-liberal. (In other writings, he seems to think the Public Option is a far-left idea. No…Single-Payer is the far-left idea. The Public Option is the compromise from that.) But I think he's right that it wouldn't have helped much. People these days just don't want to spend money on things on paper.