HarryShearer.com

Friday’s news diet was rich with stories about shrinking newsrooms—at the Washington Post, at CBS News, and at local TV stations owned by two companies merging to “achieve efficiencies”—i.e., stop competing. In many of those stories, the quotes are heavy with references to “dramatic changes” in news audiences, and ways to attract younger viewers/readers. It all has the ring of familiarity, if not cliché.

Into the Memory Hole: I watched Walter Cronkite’s storied CBS Evening News during the Vietnam War. I was the only person I knew who did so, because even then I was a news junkie. But, in lieu of the numbers that Jeff Bezos and Bari Weiss so crave, a hard fact—two of the primary advertisers on Cronkite’s broadcast were Grecian Formula 16 (for graying hair) and Geritol. They were both products aimed at, shall we say, post-post-post graduates.

In my journalism days, I also heard this adage repeatedly: people start paying attention to the news when they get their first mortgage.

So it may not be surprising that young people flock to short bursts of news alerts on their phones. They have more important things to do. Generations of news executives have chased them in vain. Instead of shrinking newsrooms, Bari Weiss and Jeff Bezos might spend their time more profitably, and more in the public interest, soliciting more ads for retinol.