Nobel Prize winner T. S. Eliot likely hadn’t a clue as to the versatility of the last verse of “The Hollow Men.”  Not only is it a possible description for the world’s end but it also illustrates the potential closing stages of the daily newspaper industry:

“This is the way the world ends,

not with a bang but a whimper.”

Consider: On any given day there’s a publisher ordering his paper’s management team to cut back further on the printed edition because, as the annual and quarterly reports say, print revenues are down, online revenues are up. While that strategy, if you can call it that, might improve profits in the short run, this pathological behavior only diminishes the paper’s revenues, competitive standing and its future.