Yes, I subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer, to keep up with the news from the state in which I lived for fifteen years, and the news from the City of Brotherly Love, and yes, I have often mocked the paper by calling it The Philadelphia Enquirer, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it sometimes can be. RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but it seems apt enough that I often use it. And thus I was wryly amused by this story:

At Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, the last newsstand stopped selling newspapers

The explanation, sadly, is old news. Nearly no one was buying them.

by Mike Newall | Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

The handwritten sign hung on the door of the newsstand at 30th Street Station. It offered one final headline from a shop that will carry no more.

“No newspapers,” it read, underlined four times for emphasis.

That’s because earlier this month Faber, the New Jersey-based newsstand and bookseller, stopped selling newspapers at its 30th Street location. The store’s shelves remain stocked with magazines, periodicals, books, snacks, greeting cards, and travel trinkets. But the iconic station’s sole newsagent is now a newsstand without newspapers.

The explanation, sadly, is old news. Nearly no one was buying them.

One would think that this story would truly alarm Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar, and the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns the newspaper. If no one is buying the newspaper, that means that no one wants the newspaper, at least not enough to pay the newsstand price of $2.95.

Slumping sales would hardly come as a surprise. Not in the Age of Smartphones. Not when the pandemic only worsened the newspaper industry’s existential struggle to survive its digital transformation. And not as newsstands themselves, like coin-operated news boxes before them, slowly disappear.

But newspaper sales had grown beyond bleak at 30th Street Station, Carr said. Each year an estimated four million passengers pass through the station’s soaring concourse, making it Amtrak’s third busiest hub. Meanwhile, in recent times, the stand rarely sold more than a dozen daily papers each day, Carr said. (And mostly out-of-town publications. Ouch.) Then there’s rising prices, delivery costs, and time and energy spent bundling up returns.

I’m actually a special case. Due at least in part to my poor hearing, getting the news via television or radio isn’t effective for me. More, when I read the news, if there’s something which sounds strange or inconsistent, I can go back are reread the part that confused me. More, using printed material for my poor site, I like using a more comprehensive and consistent site; newspapers have the ability to go more into depth than the broadcast/cablecast media. Finally, I delivered newspapers when I was in junior high and high schools. They are, for me, a medium I appreciate and like.

But if newspapers, which actually are just updated 18^th century technology, want to survive somehow, they have to produce a product that people actually want to not just read, but actually buy. National news we can get for free, even if in print form, from CNN or Fox or the new News Nation, which claims to be unbiased. I’m paying for the Inky because I’m looking for Philly and Pennsylvania news, and if the Inky can’t provide that, in a form that people will buy, in the end, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper will be history.