Are We Dying?

I keep reading about the death of newspapers. This morning I was watching my favorite TV show, CBS Sunday Morning. They did a full segment on the death of print. Even though they didn't interview anyone at The Times, they did show an article in our paper that mentioned Hiller. Amazing how you can see something familiar as it whizzes by.
It is certainly bad days. Our circulation guy is threatening us with treason if we don't subscribe. I stopped my subscription when I learned that our jobs were being outsourced. Long ago, I was the training supervisor for Circulation. I worked with a great guy, the head of home delivery Dave Stevens, on a few projects. He talked about all the care that was taken in getting a dry paper to subscribers, on time. Through talking with him, I realized I had to subscribe. One of the women who worked for me put together a product knowledge class for new hires. It was her idea and a great one. How can you sell your product (keep people from stopping delivery, in our case) if you don't know that product? She was right, Dave was right. That was 25 years ago and I've hounded my family to read the paper ever since.
What changed? Well, the paper. With costs so high, the content is lower. Favorite sections and features come and go at a whim. I know it isn't a whim. People think long and hard on these decisions, or at least I hope they do. And they outsourced the jobs of the people who hear about delivery problems and they outsourced the delivery jobs to people who deliver lots of different newspapers. Neither group has the attachment to The Times that the employees did.
Another old timer from the pressroom taught me BOHICA. Bend over, here it comes again. We would say that about the newest initiatives, because if you'd been around long enough, you'd seen them before. Marching employees through new initiatives to improve their problem solving or performance evaluating skills is one thing. But I'm getting a sense of bohica when it comes to the paper. Something else lost, something else re-worked to make it better. It's all just bohica to me.