eulogizing the news...,

NPR | Fresh Air from WHYY, January 12, 2009 · After 44 years as a newspaperman, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. is making his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, The Rules of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election.

Downie joined the Post as an summer intern in 1964, and retired in Sept. 2008 after serving 17 years as the paper's executive editor. In his last year as editor, the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes for work done in 2007 — the most it had ever earned in one year.

Though I don't think it was the intention of either the interviewer or the interviewee, what I heard in this exchange was an account of the end of newspaper journalism and the obsolescence of the business model and the distribution media (print/online) undergirding traditional journalism in America.