It is official, pick out your black clothes and choose the burial site: the death of the traditional journalist is rapidly approaching. 

     Newspapers have been in trouble for years, but with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announcing their closure, it feels as though the end many feared is coming sooner than we think.

     The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been a respected and credible newspaper covering Pittsburgh area news since 1786, but this coming May, they will release their final edition and shut down all production, print and digital. This decision was announced on Jan. 6 by its parent company, Block Communications, crediting the over $350 million dollar loss as the reason.

     Now I do not blame Block Communications for the call to shut down the paper, even if it does feel like a punch to the gut of journalists everywhere. I mean, over $350 million dollars in loss can not be ignored. 

     This unfortunate shutdown is not a standalone incident; there has been a trend of newspapers having to stop printing or shut down completely in recent years. In fact, according to Northwestern, there have been over 2,300 newspapers vanish since 2005. In 2025 alone the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Star-Ledger in New Jersey moved to online-only.

     So it truly begs the question.

     Can the newspapers be saved, or will they all fall like dominoes?

     The newspaper has been a staple for centuries; it was the way that people got their information and learned about news happening outside of their communities. That was until the creation of the internet and social media. Now people do not need a newspaper delivered to their door to keep updated; they just open their phones.

      In this process we as a society have essentially cut out the newspaper and the traditional journalist with it.

     Journalism as a job has evolved from a man on the streets scoping for stories to those who sit behind a computer, and in some cases, such as the New York Times,  use artificial intelligence to help create their articles.

     Though this change of technology certainly helps journalists push the news faster, it has also shifted the human brain and the way it wants to receive news.

     With the creation of social media people’s brains are no longer wired to read a full news story. In fact, according to Time Magazine, the current average human attention span is eight seconds, while in 2000 it was 12 seconds, showing a four-second decrease in a short 26 years. The attention span is even worse in teenagers, who have spent basically their entire lives with a cell phone in their hands. 

     The attention span is so bad that I can almost guarantee that most people gave up reading this article after the first paragraph.

     But back to the newspapers.

     How can newspapers survive when the entire concept they are based on – people being willing to sit there and read their articles – is dwindling with each passing year. Faced with this challenge, newspapers can do one of three things: they can accept defeat and just wait for the guillotine to fall, they can try to change the way human brains are wired, or they can adapt. 

     Accepting defeat is the easiest solution, but accepting defeat means letting true journalism die, and we as a society can not do that. True journalism means more than just articles; it is the shining light in the darkness of misinformation that social media allows, so we can not just let it die. Without true journalism, we can never trust any information we see on the internet ever again so we must find a way to save this sinking ship.

     Journalists could find a way to change the human attention to what it was, but there is close to no chance of that being possible, and if it were, it would not be figured out by people whose entire jobs are to write.

     This leaves the last option: to adapt. To adapt, we as journalists must accept social media and use it to get our stories out. Instead of a printed article taking up a column and a half, turn it into a minute video of you reading it. Though this could be a great solution to get true journalism out to a modern society, the same values of written journalism must be followed and journalists can not fall victim to chasing negative headlines like many social media accounts do. Is this solution the same thing as the newspaper true journalism was created on? No. But it is the only chance journalists have if they do not want to be attending their own funerals.

By Mia Williams, Editor in Chief