When<a title="Broadcast News" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092699/" target="_self"> "Broadcast News"</a> came out in 1988, those of us who worked in the newspaper business were able to look at it and laugh at the shallowness of TV news.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/000hwe5c.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-949" title="000hwe5c" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/000hwe5c-299x300.jpg" alt="" width="299" height="300" /></a>The James Brooks film was an indictment of how television news was sliding into infotainment, with knowledgeable reporters being pushed aside in favor of photogenic anchors and hard news stories losing airtime to so-called "happy news."

I had been a sports reporter for eight years at that time, and I was still eight years away from becoming first a columnist and then a business editor. It was a pretty good time for newspapers, although the trend toward shorter stories, glitzy graphics and big photos that had started in 1982 with USA Today was reaching flood tide.

Still, I don't think I could ever have imagined that a generation later, newspapers would have become every bit as bad or worse than broadcast news was then.

Who would ever have imagined that real newspapers -- good newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- would have all but disappeared except for a website. When the P-I ceased print publication, it cut its editorial staff from 166 to 20 and decided that some of its coverage would have come from the folks being covered.

Instead of an actual reporter covering City Hall, the website would use a blogger from the mayor's office.

Good luck getting any unfavorable news out of City Hall.

I don't mean to pick on the P-I. It's just an example of what's happening at papers all around the country. Investigative journalism is disappearing, and so is foreign coverage from all but a very few papers.

I never wanted to do TV news, and I'm proud that I got to be a print journalist for nearly 30 years.

But when I look at what's happening to newspapers now, and when I consider the incompetent management I saw first hand during my last six or eight years in the business, I don't have quite so superior a feeling toward television as I used to.