Earlier this year, I wrote an article for The Guardian, touching on the most urgent crisis in U.S. newspaper journalism: the papers’ inability to invigilate a determined and skilful government that has substantially advanced the time-honoured techniques of controlling information. American journalism, I suggested, had been corroded by (a) the absence of competition and (b) the mechanistic techniques taught in university journalism schools.

But there is a second dimension to the crisis: less pressing, perhaps, but far more profound. Fewer and fewer Americans are bothering with newspapers, in a way that goes beyond the gentle decline in the face of competition from other media that affects the business elsewhere in the world. Newspaper journalism in the U.S. is dying. It is a very American death: long, lingering, with any pain well anaesthetised. And the causes are appropriate for a country suffering an obesity epidemic: an excess of fat and a shortage of vigour.

The newspapers themselves are not dying, far from it. They are astonishingly profitable, operating on margins two to three times the norm for the rest of American industry. Owning a daily paper monopoly in a fairsized city is still, as Lord Thomson once said of ITV, “a licence to print money”. And almost everyone does have a monopoly. There are barely a dozen cities left with more than one daily paper and in most of those the competition is muted, either because the papers have some kind of pact, or because the battle is so unequal. In Los Angeles and Washington, for instance, the No. 2 papers are barely even flies on the elephantine backs of The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. The LA Times actually lent the money for the purchase of its competitor, the Daily News, to stop a stronger rival getting hold of it. The Washington Times, which is essentially a vanity publication for the Moonie church, has only one-eighth of the Post’s circulation.

In the 1,400 other cities with newspapers, a monopolist company takes the advertising kitty. Six huge corporations account for a third of all circulation, and the top dog, the Gannett Corporation, has one-seventh on its own. It was Gannett who invented the modern paradigm of American newspapers. The company’s legendary boss, Al Neuharth, put together 86 consecutive quarters of improved profits. Wall Street was entranced.

“In Neuharth’s wake,” wrote the editors of a recent critique of the industry, Leaving Readers Behind, “there was no longer any ambiguity about priorities...News was no longer the paramount value, simply the vehicle to achieve the paramount value, which was financial return.” In such corporations, distant managers demand profits. In the current recessionary atmosphere it is understandable that they require editorial budget cuts to ensure that they get them. But they required precisely the same thing in the 1990s, too. The journalists have even ceased to talk like newsmen. “I am not the editor of a newspaper,” said Howard Tyner, when he ran the Chicago Tribune. “I am the manager of a content company.”

Dozy, downward drift The effects are noteworthy. Overall sales figures fell even between spring 2001 and spring 2002, a timespan that included the story of the halfcentury. It was not a precipitous decline, more a dozy, downward drift. No one seems to worry hugely: in a non-competitive industry, news, quality, circulation and profitability have little to do with one another. The ABC figures show that Americans buy 55 million papers a day: about one for every five people, compared to Britain’s ratio of nearer 1:3. But these figures appear to mask even more than the usual hanky-panky. Gannett’s USA Today, the biggest-selling paper in the country and the one great newspaper success story of recent decades, officially sells almost 2.2m copies a day. In fact, a million of those are bulk sales – a fact that becomes obvious when you stay in almost any hotel in the heartland and see the pile on the porter’s desk. Its nearest rival is The Wall Street Journal, at just 1.8 million: 16 per cent of them are bulks. There are more than 14 million people in the Los Angeles area. But many of them are recent arrivals, whose first language is not English, and very few commute by bus or train. So in Los Angeles the people:papers ratio drops closer to 1:10.

What we are beginning to see is a new phenomenon: the post-newspaper society. Old-time British editors used to worry about what they wanted to read in the back streets of Derby. In the back streets of Dallas, Denver and Detroit they are just not reading. Admirers of American society often comment approvingly that everyone reads the same paper without the classsegmentation of Britain. It is an illusion: the distinction is between those who read the paper and those who don’t.

In this atmosphere, journalism has atrophied. The U.S. is a land of unprecedented bustle and creativity and competition. It is reflected in Hollywood, publishing, TV, Silicon Valley, magazines. Fortunes are won and squandered; reputations are made and lost. The American media industry is stunningly diverse and creative – except for this one dreary backwater. The newspapers plod on regardless, as though journalistic perfection were attained decades ago and improvement was impossible. The whole country is a land of murders, madness and marvels. How on earth can you make the United States boring? The American papers manage it.

From the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska) to the Key West Citizen (Florida), almost every paper in the country is designed to precisely the same template: a broadsheet with lengthy headlines and five main sections: news, local news, business, sport, and entertainment, which will be given a fancy name like Style or Life or Express or Go! This will contain the Dear Abby agony column and the syndicated strip cartoons. There will be extra oneday- a-week sections – Cars, Property, maybe Food and Health. They may be some recognition of particular local preoccupations – the sports teams of course, the motor industry in Detroit, the Internet in San Jose. But the overall tone will be the same everywhere: corporate and flavourless without any sense of idiosyncrasy, eccentricity or risk.

All this is supported, in the bigger monopolist papers, by phenomenal amounts of advertising. They maintain their lock on classified ads, but this is backed by something over which the British press can only drool: a symbiotic relationship with the retail trade. Our own local department store in Washington, Hecht’s, has a perpetual sale, but the full discounts are available only if you clip the barcoded coupons from The Washington Post. The other Saturday, the Post also carried 33 separate advertising inserts, the biggest running to 60 pages.

“Your newspapers come from a journalistic tradition,” one American reporter explained. “Our papers are different. Essentially, it’s a mercantile tradition.” The difference can be seen in the Post. I recently noticed one inside news page, three-quarters of which was given over to sexy pictures of models in their undies. This was an ad for Hecht’s. The other quarter was devoted to a gloomy report on human rights abuses in Iraq. In American newspapers, people are drawn in by the ads and might then notice the editorial.

“The economics of it are hugely different in the U.S.,” said Martin Dunn, who edited Today in Britain and tabloids in both Boston and New York. “If you’re the sole paper in a big metropolitan area, you’re going to get the Chevrolet dealers. You are a marketplace pure and simple. But even if you get hold of the greatest story your region has ever seen, it doesn’t matter whether you put it in today or tomorrow.”

Of course, there is still great journalism done in the United States, even in the newspapers. There are brilliant columnists, determined investigators, and clued-up, agenda-setting, specialists. But the buoys of excellence bob around in an ocean of mediocrity. This takes various forms. The small papers are so formulaic that a local editor in Wyoming invented an imaginary paper with its own front-page:

Boring Stuff Debated at Dull Meeting Something Crashes, Burns or Blows Up Some Old Politician Retires or Dies Another Project That Will Cost Lots & Lots of Dollars Hey! They’re Doing That Wacky Thing Over There

The great papers are more varied, but equally grey and dull. Front page stories are always continued on some obscure inside page, so that reading a paper on a crowded train is a gymnastic exercise. They are nearly always over-written, from the unwieldy portmanteau intros onward. The design and picture editing would have been passé on an English provincial newspaper of the early 1970s. The use of colour is pathetic. The headlines, almost universally, are turgid. As The New York Times said, over three columns, of Bush’s State of the Union address:

Calling Iraq a Serious Threat, Bush Vows That He’ll Disarm It, and Also Rebuild U.S. Economy

(And that’s the country’s best newspaper. You should see the bad ones.) The order of priorities is governed by arcane rules. And many of the most famous columnists are name-dropping, egocentric bores.

I believe this has consequences that do not show up even in those misleading circulation figures. The latest research I have seen, by the Newspaper Association of America, suggests that 54 per cent of adult Americans still “read” a daily paper, compared to 62 per cent in 1990. But only 46 per cent say they use them as a source of daily news. What one suspects is that many papers are sold because classified advertising is still the only viable way to find a car, a house or a job. The papers are not merely unreadable, they are substantially unread.

Tom Kunkel, dean of journalism at the University of Maryland, disarmingly agrees that newspapers have got “kinda boring”. He thinks the phenomenon derives from the Post’s investigative triumph during the Watergate scandal 30 years ago. “We just got so sober-sided and Serious with a capital S that it drained a lot of personality out of the newspapers.” Terry Quinn, a former editor of the Scottish Daily Record who worked as a corporate executive for Thomson Newspapers in the U.S., believes university-taught journalism courses are a main cause of the problem, and Kunkel does not disagree: “We’re all culpable,” he says.

The same flat prose Quinn would talk to industry seminars giving his take on the problem, which is a dangerous exercise for an outsider. “I’d describe the papers as Spock-like: being remote, logical and almost lacking humanity.” He insisted this went down extremely well, but he has now retreated to New Zealand, damning U.S. papers before he left as “smug, complacent and utterly resistant to serious change”. And certainly no one responded to his criticisms. Indeed, the tentacles of turgidity run right through the system. A friend of mine has a teenage daughter who is a very gifted writer and edits her high school paper. This is a very professional product, and I wish that were a compliment. What it means is that her tutors have instructed the students to turn out the same flat prose, laid out in the same flat manner, as every other paper in the U.S. If even aspirant teenagers are not allowed to stir up trouble, and display signs of cheek, experimentation and risk-taking, how boring are they going to be as grown-up journalists?

Even the handful of daily tabloids display similar symptoms. When I was in Philadelphia recently, the tabloid there, the Daily News, devoted its first four pages to a complaint that the new baseball stadium under construction was not going to devote enough space to works of art. For the first time in my life, I began to think a nation could be improved enormously by the arrival of a jumbo jetload of Fleet Street sub-editors.

Martin Dunn found it difficult to inculcate his own methods. “A lot of the time in the U.S. it is the journalists writing for the journalist rather than the reader. I found it hard to deal with that. Time and time again, pieces were submitted that were written with the aim of being lauded by the Colombia School of Journalism rather than the readership.”

Lord knows, British tabloids have their flaws and problems. So do the British broadsheets. Many of those problems are echoed in the U.S. How do you compete in a multi-media world? How do you attract young readers? But if British newspapers are in their death throes, at least we are kicking and screaming like crazy. American papers are just slipping gently into slumber, by sending their readers there first.