The fall of the newspaper industry has nothing at all to do with the rise of television or the internet. It’s really because they simply creep people out. It turns out that the printing press would’ve never have been invented were it not for Gutenberg’s dabbling in alchemy and sorcery. The very first press would never have functioned without the power of dark magic. As with all engineering (dark magic is but one field of engineering), there are trade-offs… some more malicious than others.
In the case of the printing press, the curse wasn’t so bad. While reading any pages printed by the machine, those pages would collect just as much information about the person reading. This wasn’t so much of a problem in the beginning because the invention was new and people at the time understood how trade-offs worked. They also assumed that eventually there would be a new way to print or the curse would simply wear off.
That never happened.
Instead, the dark technology progressed and newspaper publishers began packing more and more informational text on each page. This caused the pages themselves to be literally starving for information about the reader. At the peak of the newspaper industry, it got to the point that when even near a newspaper, most people got a creepy, foreboding feeling that they were being watched. And so, readership dropped precipitously.
In fact, that’s why there’s so much fake news proliferating now. In an effort to stem off that creepy feeling, news makers have started injecting less useful information in their publications. They’ve found that this abates the hunger of the printed page and makes it feel more approachable.
Interestingly, this is not why they continue to publish low quality information on the internet as well. Although it is a feat of engineering, the creation of the internet didn’t involve any dark magic. Just creepy people… and folks seem to be more OK with that.
