Ink-stained and wretched

Re “Read it and weep: the perilous fall of the Press-Telegram,” Opinion, March 23

I grew up in Long Beach and, in the early 1960s, delivered the Long Beach Press-Telegram on a Schwinn Wasp bicycle. We on the “paper corner” made about $1 a day, and we did everything -- folding the papers, banding them and inserting them in plastic bags when it rained. At the end of the month, we went house to house to collect the subscription fees, and from the money we collected we paid the Press-Telegram for the papers we had bought on account. We were all under 18, and there were barely any adults in sight as we went about our business.

It’s not just newspapers that are vanishing but a whole way of life. Dennis McDougal rightly mourns the potential loss of a training ground for cub reporters, but another training ground -- where boys got a first taste of what it meant to earn money that didn’t come from their parents and literally ran their own micro-businesses -- vanished long ago.

Dave Todd

San Marino

The managers running newspapers are incapable of doing what is required to save them. They just don’t understand the underlying causes of the flight of readers. Researchers such as Robert Putnam and David Mindich have shown it has less to do with the Internet or television as it does with those under 40 turning away from civic involvement.

Young people today are too busy being consumers to join organizations or become politically involved, which is exactly what the advertisers and corporations want them to be. They know full well that a discriminating and politically engaged audience doesn’t always make the best consumers.

In a way, newspapers are victims of their own success. After newspapers led the way to a consumer society, consumers are finding they can do without them.

William H. DuBay

Costa Mesa