“We have to reduce your piece to 660 words,” he said. “It used to be 750, but…” The editor didn’t need to complete the rest.

Welcome to the new-format Spectator, less in width, fewer ads, a little lighter every year. Its readers would agree though, it’s still the voice of Hamilton, and even our eyes on the country and the world. In its shrinkage, it’s not alone. Google “the decline of newspapers” and you get a raft of data, much of it American but valid on this side of the border. Here’s a snapshot: In the U.S., more than a hundred daily papers have disappeared over the last decade; circulation is down several per cent. And while some national papers have grown, many others have combined or shut down. And it’s similar in Canada—diminishing circulation, declining revenues, shrinking papers.

What’s gives? First off, this isn’t new. TV, that fifties baby, allowed us to turn there for our news. Then, 40 years later, the internet eroded newspapers’ role as the major news provider even further. Both media bring you the news faster, more visually than newsprint. If that weren’t enough, there’s the profit margin: other media don’t have to pay for printing presses, delivery fleets and paper boys or girls. The internet provides for cheap, even free, classified advertising: want a job? Sell your car? Rent an apartment? Open your laptop or turn on your phone. And large-scale advertising dollars are turning elsewhere too, lowering the income, increasing the risk to newspapers’ bottom lines.

Who cares?

We all should. There are consequences of the shrinking footprint of newspapers: locally, newspaper closures can lead to increases in government waste, and to declines in civic engagement. Without newspapers, there’s little actual reporting: social media doesn’t put reporters on the street, or sit in the back room to fact-check. Bloggers can’t do it. Cable TV doesn’t have the bandwidth. This in turn leads to something called “narrowcasting,” or polarization, splintering audiences into smaller and smaller slivers, each one tuned in to its own brand of “truth.”

It’s not just newspapers that are shrinking. Our grandsons kid that while we mark their growth at regular intervals on our pantry door, they can just as easily mark our declining height. There must be something in the milk, I think. More seriously, there’s lots of other shrinkage: the window for improvement in our climate for one. Chances of a quick end to the war in Ukraine for another. Or an end to gun violence. The democratic window, if there is such a thing, seems to be closing too, as autocratic rulers emerge. Worst of all, a world in which truth is commonly held as fact? That world is shrinking.

Enter balanced-reporting, multi-sourced newspapers. Just as in my past life where peer-reviewed, ethical research payed such a huge role, newspapers feature prominently in this one: they generate factual evidence on which their reputations stand and honest opinions can be formed. Did you read about the woman and her daughter accused of tampering with vote-counting in the U.S.? Hang on, the story was false: no identifiable source, no independent corroboration, a one-off, biased social medial platform, never once to my knowledge verified by a credible news source.

What we’ve been talking about, in fact what most of us see as the product of the newspaper industry, is the paper, the thing outside my door every morning. The future may be different however, focusing less on print and much more on online distribution of the news. That’s what matters most — the news, however it’s delivered, factual, accurate, relevant.