Look, you might not admire all the editors, but the great majority are pros. Their talent is what we used to call "news judgment." Even the editors who make you maddest seem to possess it. Nor is a newspaper other than a wonderful thing to hold and fold and clip and snip; a tangible -- tangible, I emphasize -- record to consult and reconsult, sometimes to frame, sometimes to tuck away in a book or album.
So no one cares anymore? I would not venture any such thing. Our newspapers are not going away. Those that are wise -- I can hope The Dallas News falls in that category, though I'm from Missouri and will have to see the hard evidence -- will survive and, in a different way, flourish, as tellers of complicated stories, especially complicated local ones. (Save for the great national rags, like my Wall Street Journal.)
A goodly number -- some papers are doing it already -- will flourish by adapting to the competition, proving, it may be, how a good newspaper with good blogs will produce greatness.
In all of which there is something to like, something to root for. Nothing stays still. Nothing can. The perpetual challenge is to hold on to the good while figuring out how to put change to useful account. Meanwhile, the semi-self-inflicted tribulations of The Dallas Morning News and its suffering staff -- pros, good people, newspaper people -- go on and on, and the heart weeps for and with these folk.
Wordsworth's sonnet on the extinction of the Venetian Republic comes to mind:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is pass'd away.