Paper Pusher

It takes a brave soul to write a book today about the state of newspapers in North America.

The pace of change in both media industries and technology is such that no matter what the content, the book is bound to be at least partly out of date by the time it is published.

Marc Edge has been able to mitigate that somewhat in Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers by looking backward at the newspaper business rather than forward. He describes what has happened to newspapers primarily in the United States (with a couple of nods to Canada) focusing mostly on the past decade and a half. His argument that newspapers are far from dead is counterintuitive. It flies in the face of non-stop predictions over the past half a dozen years that their time is up. The doomsayers are led by those he describes as the Future of News consensus—digital evangelists such as Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen—all based in journalism schools in New...