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Endangered species: An old-fashioned newsstand.

((File photo))

On the day all of those staff cuts at The Star-Ledger were announced, I happened to be talking with Dave Roberts. I had called the former mayor of Hoboken to discuss events in his town, which has been in the news lately because of the Bridgegate scandal.

When the subject turned to the parlous state of modern journalism, Roberts assured me he’s doing his best to keep newspapers alive. He buys three every morning, he said. He recalled owning a newsstand in town during the 1980s.

"My uncle Joe and I ran the business," he recalled. "He would have to come in with four or five teenagers every Saturday night and set up an assembly line for the Bergen Record, The Star-Ledger and the Sunday Times. When the guys came out from the back room, they’d be covered in ink."

In the morning, the place would be mobbed.

"The people would come in so fast that we couldn’t even put the money in the cash register," he said. "We must have sold 800 or 900 papers."

The other day he visited the place.

"There I was in the store I once owned and the pile of Sunday New York Times was there," he said. "There were 15 of them."

The ex-mayor’s expertise in the area of newspapers goes far beyond selling them. In the years he was a councilman and then mayor, the town was covered by reporters from two daily papers. All that attention kept the pols honest, he said.

An article about Dave Roberts and his late wife when they ran the newsstand.

"Having one newspaper keeps the politicians on their toes," he said. "Having two newspapers keeps the newspapers on their toes."

But what happens when there are zero newspapers covering a town?

"When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc., firsthand, full time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin."

Or so predicted a blogger by the name of "Instapundit" in a 2005 book titled "An Army of Davids." He predicted the task of reporting would be taken over by eager amateurs.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The typical blogger doesn’t want to sit in a zoning board meeting writing about variances. If he’s a left-winger, he’s sitting in front of his computer railing about how the Koch brothers are ruining the ozone layer. If he’s a right-winger, he’s complaining about Benghazi while misspelling it.

That sort of thing may amuse these people, but actual reporting is hard work. And as the decidedly non-instant pundit Samuel Johnson put it three centuries ago, "None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

In the absence of newspapers, where is that money to come from? The boosters of the internet predicted that "hyper-local" news sites would pay reporters to do this work. Alas, AOL’s experiment in this area, Patch.com, was an expensive failure, and for a simple reason. Why pay someone $40,000 a year to cover the town council when you can sell infinitely more ads by posting a video of a puppy playing with a baby?

No one has quite figured out how to pay for serious journalism in this new era, but Jeff Bezos is trying. The Amazon.com founder recently bought the Washington Post and is busy trying to put together some synergistic hybrid of web and print that will succeed in the modern era.

I was talking the other day with a friend who works for the Post and he mentioned one of the problems with putting news on the net. It seems that a high percentage of readers will simply click on the one article they want to read and then leave the site, thus failing to provide the clicks that create ad revenue.

There's an answer for that, and you can see it on the sites of the London tabloids. On the same day the Post front page offered an article headlined "U.S. job numbers signal economic recovery," the Daily Mail offered such enticements as "Getting breast implants was the best decision I ever made!" over photographic proof that the author of that statement got her money's worth.

Now that all of that nasty ink is gone, the sky’s the limit. I’m not going to tell Bezos how to run his business, but I will tell him this:

The first editor to figure out how to get a polar bear cub to cover the White House is going to make a fortune.

COMMENTS: Every time I write about the subject of declining newspaper circulation I get a lot of comments from amateur media experts to the effect that this is the result of some sort of bias perceived by said amateur.

Please do not bore the rest of us by posting such comments here. The loss in circulation has affected both right-leaning and left-leaning publications equally, i.e. both the New York Post and the New York Times.

The professionals in this field all realize that the real problem for print publications is that so much advertising has moved to the internet. That is pure economics.

Keep that in mind when comment and you will go a long way toward avoiding the characterization offered by Samuel Johnson.

ALSO: Mark Magyar of New Jersey Spotlight offered this perspective based on his research:



Read the article and the chart and you will have a better understanding of the nature of the issue.