My wife and I started watching "Lou Grant" on DVD the other night, and after we finished the first episode, Nicole asked me what seemed like an odd question.

<em>"Doesn't it make you feel sad?"</em>

She was referring to the fact that I had been a journalist for nearly 30 years before my career ended abruptly nearly three years ago. I said no, that I had come to terms with what had happened, but in the last couple of days, I have realized there actually was some<em> there</em> there, unlike with the city of Oakland.

I have been sad about the newspaper business, but not because my own career ended when it did. I really <em>have</em> come to terms with that. But what I'm having quite a few sad thoughts about is that it doesn't seem to be just my career that went away. I'm beginning to think that newspapers really are starting to die out.

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I've been re-reading <a title="Late Edition" href="http://www.amazon.com/Late-Love-Story-Bob-Greene/dp/0312375301" target="_self">"Late Edition,"</a> a book on the subject by one of my favorite writers. Bob Greene was one of the top columnists in the country for more than 30 years, and he tells the story of his first job as a copy boy at the Columbus Citizen-Journal, a paper that died in 1985. One of the first and most fascinating facts that he points out is that in 1950, newspapers had 123 percent penetration into American households. More than one newspaper per household; quite a few families got both a morning and an evening paper.

As of 2004, that number was down to 49 percent and I'm sure it's even lower now.

Newspapers are dying, and the worst thing about it is that the people running them are doing their damnedest to kill them off even faster. Instead of fighting back with better quality, they're surrendering to the Internet, to podcasts, to Twitter and everything else, dumbing down their product to where people can legitimately ask why bother.

The last boss I had -- not so coincidentally the worst one -- loved to blather on about how we weren't in the newspaper business, we were in the communication business and it didn't matter how we communicated as long as we reached people and made money doing so.

<em>What a maroon.</em>

You've got that right, voice in my head. A few years ago, the <em>Seattle Post-Intelligencer</em>, a pretty fair newspaper in its time, went to Web only publishing in an effort to stay in business. Of course, the <em>P-I</em> cut its staff of reporters, photographers and editors from 166 to 30. Think they're still covering Seattle? Probably not so well.

It would be easy to say the problem is just part of a bigger one, that people don't <em>read</em> as much as they used to. That's maybe the scariest thing of all. Reading books is one of the best indicators of whether someone is intelligent or capable of critical thinking. Show me somebody who doesn't read and I'll show you someone who has to prove to me they're intelligent.

I literally cannot imagine life without reading.

I have a 13-year-old nephew who has a pretty fine brain in his head, and I was definitely pleased -- and not at all surprised -- when his mother told me he reads something like a book a day.

There is hope as long as there are kids like him.

Of course, by the time he's grown up, books may be harder and harder to find, because there are a lot fewer people like him than there are people who see reading as some sort of chore.

Of course, there have always been a lot of those people.

We just never used to celebrate them.