THE LEAD: The New York Times took a look back to a time when newspapers were viable media operations, in an attempt to find that fork in the road where traditional media zigged and the future zagged. This piece by David Streitfeld relies on media icon and digital Cassandra Roger Fidler as its narrative thread through the past several decades of journalistic decline.

During the salad days of the 1980s and 1990s, Fidler foresaw a world in which newspapers would be cut free from the strictures of print and digital media would make everything easier to access. Content would come more quickly, sharing would take place more easily and everyone would benefit from being more fully informed. He was pretty close, except for, of course, that last part.

It’s hard to take him to task for not foreseeing dank memes and cat TikToks.

Streitfeld notes that not every aspect of journalism has died quietly in pulp-based pages, but the essential content that is “news” appears to be the last passenger on the Titanic:

The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest.

The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather report and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself. Local and regional coverage had a hard time establishing itself as a paying proposition.

WHAT HAPPENED? If you want to know HOW and WHY traditional media is dying, put three drinks into your average journalist and make sure the kids are out of earshot before you ask the question. A few of the answers are both easy and complex:

• Traditional media drastically underestimated/didn’t think hard enough about the impact digital media would have in the world.
• Media outlets and owners misinterpreted the reason why ad money flowed to them so freely, only to find out too late that ads are all about buying eyeballs, not supporting an important public endeavor.
• The once-private newspaper industry went public, with shareholder value being a driver of budget cuts and staff slashing.

These are just a couple things in that realm, but the bigger issue isn’t how the newspapers themselves came to land on the endangered species list, but rather why it is that local and regional news content hasn’t made a successful leap to the digital marketplace. Here are a couple possible reasons:

• People are no longer as strongly tied to geographic areas as they once were, making local or regional news seem less important in their lives.
• Journalists who once had a stranglehold on what people saw and read incorrectly assumed that what the journalists saw as valuable mattered to the readers and viewers out there. With more options now, the “I write, you read” model isn’t as steadfast as it once was.
• News isn’t as sexy as other things that captures the public’s attention, and there are plenty more “junk food” options out there. The readers who once got a well-balanced meal from a newspaper now can just grab whatever fun or weird stuff they want like a kid in a candy store.
• The fractured nature of our society has readers seeking out content that is supportive of their opinions and positions, rather than looking for a balanced source of information. (I can’t tell you the number of times when I’d write about an issue featuring X and Y positions, only to have X tell me that I was biased toward Y and Y tell me the opposite.)
• News was never financially viable. Being so is important these days.
• News hasn’t changed. We have.

That last one hit me when I was looking for a definition of news and found things like “reports of current events” and “information about important happenings” and “formal reports of events considered likely to be significant to the target audience.”

By these definitions, Taylor Swift winning Time’s “Person of the Year” award is news. It’s current, it’s a report, it’s information and it’s likely to be significant to a target audience. Traditional journalists might not LIKE that this is the case, but that doesn’t make it any less on point.

DISCUSSION STARTER: If there is one thing I think can pull a “Mia Wallace/Pulp Fiction” moment for news, it would be going back to the most basic human driver: Self-interest. If we can do a better job of telling people not just what is happening, but also WHY it matters to THEM personally in a much, much better way than we do, news has a chance.

Case in point: A few years back, our school’s foundation and fundraising arm was in trouble and was looking at a potential bankruptcy. I walked into my 8 a.m. reporting class and asked the students what they thought of all this.

Blank stares.

“How many of you are on a scholarship here?” I asked. Everyone of them raised a hand.

“OK, so WHERE do you think that money is being kept?” I asked.

The blank stared turned to terrified looks. When I gave them a break in the middle of the class, they all immediately started googling the name of their scholarship and the foundation’s role in it.

This requires us to know our audience extremely well and put in the extra work of constantly explaining “this matters because…” but in considering the alternative, it’s probably worth the effort.