Allow me, please, to bring attention to a pair of developments in the newspaper industry. If you catch a small whiff of self-congratulation in this, I will not make false protest. I’m feeling like Cassandra.

You may recall that a couple of week ago I predicted that an American newspaper somewhere would soon abandon its Monday edition, being the first to break the taboo that daily publication is sacrosanct. Over the weekend, the News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., announced that its Monday paper will be reduced to a “quick-read edition” consisting of two sections: A news section and a sports section, along with whatever classified advertising the paper has bamboozled from people who haven’t heard about Craigslist.

It’s not the total abandonment of Monday that I predicted, but it’s a big step toward it. Look for other newspapers to similarly reduce their already shrunken Monday editions.

Further back in the past — early September, to be specific — I found myself on North Carolina Pubic Radio discussing the ailments of the newspaper business. At one point, I lamented that cuts in staff and the speeded-up news cycle had undermined those richly detailed, compelling stories that are the primary strength of newspapers: “They’re caught up in the speed and the immediacy, and what’s being sacrificed is that overarching narrative that comes along with any story, with any article. And sadly, a lot of people who are good at that are no longer in the newspaper business.”

A piece in the New York Times two days ago struck the same note, explaining how the departures of experienced, capable journalists from their newspapers (either through layoffs or buyouts) have only further eroded the industry’s ability to maintain and expand its audience:

It is not the young fresh faces that are getting whacked — they come cheap — but the most experienced, proven people in the room, the equivalent of the sales clerk who could walk you through a thicket of widescreen television choices to the one that actually works for you. …

Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

There are wounds that are inflicted upon you, and wounds you inflict upon yourself. The newspaper industry these days has an abundance of both.

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