Ever since I was a little kid, newspapers were part of my life.

I remember my father would bring home the New York Times and the New York Post from work, and we’d get Newsday delivered.

The New York Times’s sobriquet- ‘all the news that’s fit to print’- was one of the reasons why my school required us to peruse its pages.  Reading the daily news summary was also required, as was a description of one article we found to be of interest.  And, then, each Monday, we had to take the NY Times Week of the News test.  (Yes, the Times distributed it free to each school that wanted it.)

The New York Post was often more interesting to me.  It had comics (something you’d never see in the Times), and liberal commentators.  (You guessed it- the Times’ opinions were what could loosely be called Rockefeller Republican).

Newsday was a cross between the New York Daily News (plenty of pictures, most of the articles were written for those with a sixth grade education) and a local rag (it was a Long Island newspaper, after all).  It was great for the local news, but it was, at best, a distant second or third when it came to national and international event coverage.

Once I was old enough to go to the candy store (back when I was young, candy stores sold magazines, newspapers, tobacco, sandwiches, pop, ice cream, sundaes- and the occasional illegal racing bets), I became a reader of the Herald Tribune. It was slightly to the left of the Times, but it had the best columnists- Dorothy Thompson, Red Smith, Roger Kahn, Richard Watts, Jr., Homer Bigart, Walter Kerr, Walter Lippmann, St. Clair McKelway, Judith Crist, Dick Schaap, Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Jimmy Breslin. After a disastrous newspaper strike, it was merged yet again with the New York World Telegram and the New York Journal American, and was known as the World Herald Tribune, the one paper I read every day until it finally folded when I was in college.

I still read multiple papers daily- the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Long Beach Press Telegram, and Ha’Aretz.  Which makes me one of the very few folks who actually really reads newspapers.

Over the past decade, newspapers have been fading away.  Some attempt to stick around as digital rags. (The Ann Arbor News comes to mind- it now shows up in print on Thursday and Sundays, with on-the-web postings every day of the week.)

The local papers have lost advertising to Craigslist, Google, and Facebook.  So, with their money drying up, they’ve been disappearing faster than ice cubes in the Sahara.  In the last 15 years, some 1800 newspapers disappeared from the news counter.  This means half the counties in the US have a single paper and some 200 are left with none.

Even the biggest three US papers are feeling the heat.  Since about 2010, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have lost about 1/3 their circulation.  And, that’s considered to be good- cities with populations above 200K (consider Minneapolis and Chicago) have lost more than 40% of their circulation.

Of course, that means we’ve lost even more of our news reporters- with only about 35000 left across the US.

No wonder Americans are ripe for the plucking by Russian and Chinese trolls.  We now get our news (sic) from Facebook and Google, which put the most promoted tripe up front.  There is no editor involved who puts the most important articles on page 1, let alone the most important international article on the top right of page one and the most important local article at the top left.

Nope.  It’s now who promotes an article the most.

It’s time for all of us to exercise discretionary analysis and make sure the articles we are reading really qualify  as news.

Or become the next sucker to a Russian, Chinese, or North Korean troll.