The reliably dyspeptic Joseph Epstein recently penned an article with the upbeat rubric, Are Newspapers Doomed? Although eulogies for printed news dailies have been appearing fairly regularly since the advent of radio, Epstein�s article is interesting in the way it remorselessly analyses newspapers’ flailing attempt to attract young readers with a bourgeoning range of �lifestyle� and celebrity features�often at the expense of serious commentary and in-depth coverage of the arts. He writes:

Nevertheless, if I had to prophesy, my guess would be that newspapers will hobble along, getting ever more desperate and ever more vulgar. More of them will attempt the complicated mental acrobatic of further dumbing down while straining to keep up, relentlessly exerting themselves to sustain the mighty cataract of inessential information that threatens to drown us all. Those of us who grew up with newspapers will continue to read them, with ever less trust and interest, while younger readers, soon enough grown into middle age, will ignore them.

Although Epstein�s remarks concern the newspaper market in the United States, his Spenglerian perspective seems equally applicable to this side of the Atlantic. In Ireland and Britain the leader in what might be called consumerist journalism is clearly The Sunday Times, numerous supplements of which seem to exist in the radioactive shadow of Heat magazine. For example, the Times Online website now features a dedicated Big Brother weblog, which unfolds under the hypocritical banner proclaiming �We Watch So You Don�t Have To.�Similarly, The Guardian, which seems to have paradoxically found room for more superfluous journo-musings in its new compact �Berliner� format, can have its cake and eat it by rolling in the muck of celeb culture while theoretically discussing the �significance� of it all. Hence Zoe Williams can write a column under the tagline �Big Brother’s muzzling of George Galloway encapsulates the reasons for our political malaise.� Big Brother and �political malaise��the perfect Grauniad combo!In Ireland, the Sunday Independent attempts to take on the pseudo-Hibernian Sunday Times with no less than 3 leisure supplements: Entertainment, Lifestyle, and Features. Yet despite its self-conscious metropolitan swagger, there�s something dismayingly provincial about the sight of the small pond of Irish celebrity being drained week in and week out. (For example, anyone gripped by the prospect of the brutish Brendan O’Connor sharing his insights into Stringfellows� lapdancing clubs? I though not.) The Irish Times� venture into lifestyle journalism has been awkward to say the least�-think of a sturdy Church of Ireland matron in tweeds behind the wheel of a Mazda Mx5. Far less catty than its English counterparts, The Irish Times Magazine is in many respects a glorified television guide, with a few plodding columns on wine and gardening thrown in. However, its forays into Ireland�s booming retail realm are often as shamelessly cheerleading as the paper�s notoriously gawping Property supplement. (I vividly recall that some years ago the magazine bizarrely describing Morton�s, an unremarkable Ranelagh supermarket, as having a �cocktail-party atmosphere.�) It also provides a platform for the extremely popular R�is�n Ingle, whose weekly columns chronicle the ups-and-downs of being a single woman in Dublin. I have some friends who find Ingle�s musings absorbing and funny, but to me these rather twee jottings (this week she discussed the revelations stemming from buying an iPod�-a subject even my grandfather would find old hat at this stage) are part of a wider problem in contemporary journalism. Once newspapers delivered the news, then, as television effectively monopolized this territory, the best publications tried to hold onto readership through a combination of investigative journalism and informed analysis. But the former is expensive and the latter bores a lot of people. (Some �colour writers� such as Kevin �Bastard� Myers and Mark �Eurabia� Steyn bypass the worthy chore of illuminating readers by simply using current affairs as a screen on which to project their straight-shooter personas.)However, editors gradually learned that people would actually read people writing about the mundane minutiae of their own existences. (Perhaps it was William Leith who pioneered this auto-cannibalism with his mid-1990s columns for the Independent on Sunday.)It was a cheap way to fill space. Yet just as television news destroyed one of newspaper�s raison d�etre, so the blogosphere is devaluing the currency of personal revelation. There are now a million William Leiths and R�is�n Ingles sharing their personal vicissitudes with a global audience, although, admittedly, only a very small percentage are as well-written as the print versions. Nevertheless, 0.01% of several million blogs still yields a hell of a lot of readable copy. So with papers� most recent repositioning being quickly undermined by free substitutes�what are the options? Well, according to Epstein:

My own preference would be for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage, and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions. I imagine such papers directed by editors who could choose for me�as neither the Internet nor I on my own can do�the serious issues, questions, and problems of the day and, with the aid of intelligence born of concern, give each the emphasis it deserves. In all likelihood a newspaper taking this route would go under; but at least it would do so in a cloud of glory, guns blazing. And at least its loss would be a genuine subtraction. About our newspapers as they now stand, little more can be said in their favor than that they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish.

Last weekend, it was possible to read about the advantages of having small breasts (The Sunday Times), the relationships between six �fashionistas� and their dogs (or their �four-legged friends� as the somnolent sub at The Irish Times Magazine phrased it), and the reflections of a journalist who recently �met one of the men who committed GBH on my heart many years ago.� (The Sunday Independent). We might guiltily have read some of the above pieces, but if, given the worsening economics of newspapering, articles of such a calibre fail to appear in future, would we weep into our morning coffee?