One of the many small joys I get from business travel is the chance to read great newspapers. I’ve been a longtime fan of the Straits Times, and the South China Morning Post will be a starting point of any day I spend in Hong Kong. In the past few years, having added Europe and the UK to my “patch”, I usually gravitate to the UK dailies – I’d love to have a favourite, but I don’t find any of them to be a standout. On the continent it’s the International Herald Tribune, or Le Monde, only to exercise my pathetically basic French comprehension.

To be enjoyed, a newspaper needs time, a good coffee, and a quiet spot to read.  An airplane has only one of these attributes, but a good newspaper helps fill the time anyway. At home I’m usually pressed for time, so I mostly restrict quiet newspaper reading activities to the deck on Saturday mornings, which is the one time each week I willingly buy a newspaper.  (Of course it’s the Sydney Morning Herald – the Brisbane Courier Mail is effectively now a content-free advertisement vehicle).

It seems I’m not the only one that’s reducing newspaper consumption; publishers are going to the wall so quickly in the US that a Democratic Senator has introduced a bill to allow newspaper companies to reconstitute themselves as non-profits. (Remember the old joke Jeff Bezos used to tell about Amazon?  The one where even he called it Amazon.org because it was a non-profit? Think about that again in 5 years when we all have Kindles.)

We can lament the downfall of quality newspapers all we like but it was flagged by cost-cutting in recent years; of course when classified revenues go downhill, journalists feel the pinch and are let go. There’s less journalistic opportunity in new media than many of us would like to see (”Content? That’s what our readers create!”) because the type of journalism I remember from my youth is now the way of the dodo. Details, agendas and context don’t seem to count as much to Generation Y as immediacy, colour and star quality.  The journalistic effort that went into the events leading up to and resulting in the Fitzgerald Inquiry probably wouldn’t be reproduced in today’s newsrooms, and certainly not outside the ABC.

This challenge is being felt all over the world. The Huffington Post even has an entire section devoted to bad news about newspapers and the impact on investigative journalism.

All this explains why yesterday morning, reading the SMH at home over coffee, I read (in order) Peter FitzSimons, the sports results, the arts section and…… went back to my PC. Where I found nothing much of interest, either.

Seems I’d already read all the news that was fit to print. Or publish, in any form.

And it made me sad.