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Almost every day, I hear from people who tell me why newspapers are losing circulation. They cite:

* We're too liberal or too conservative.

* We've got too little local news or not enough national news.

* We're in bed with the power structure or antagonistic to the power structure.

* We're moving too slowly or too quickly away from the way things have always been done.

While all those things have probably contributed in minor ways, they aren't really it.

Steve Smith, one of the more progressive editors in the country until he resigned his position in Spokane last year, posted a speech he gave that addresses what's happened in the newspaper business. While I don't agree with everything he says, he describes the causes of circulation losses clearly and, I believe, accurately.

It isn’t about content, mostly — research tells us that. The social and technological forces simply proved insurmountable.

Still, we can argue that industry leaders in both print and broadcast failed to understand or embrace new business models or that their experiments were the wrong experiments at the wrong time. But they were not blind to their changing circumstances.

At the turn of this century, at the dawn of the decade, the steady, progressive loss of print readership and circulation began to accelerate, driven now by the digital explosion and the proliferation of competitors. Some, such as Craigslist, struck at the heart of the legacy media advertising base. Information aggregators who, let’s be honest, steal the work of others and distribute it without paying for its creation, contributed to the devaluation of news and information, creating the digital-era myth that information is free.

Meanwhile, the growth of cable and satellite TV, channel proliferation and market fragmentation, competition from PCs and video games…all of that contributed to accelerating declines in the audience for traditional TV news.

Simultaneously, changes in the marketplace began to erode, at a pace far faster than expected, the financial foundations of traditional news organizations, particularly newspapers.

Changing buyer habits have all but destroyed the department store culture that was the bedrock of a newspaper’s revenue stream. Discount chains such as Wal-Mart and Costco are now the retail leaders. And these chains have foresworn traditional print advertising in favor of direct mail and word of mouth (Costco) and cheap inserts and television (Wal-Mart).

He proceeds to talk about journalism's future, its challenges and opportunities. It's a long read, but it moves quickly. And most of it can apply to Greensboro.

A nice story:

On Tuesday, we published a story on the front page about Greensboro Urban Ministry's need for $100,000 to operate its emergency shelters.

This morning, Mike Aiken, the executive director of Urban Ministry, sent out an e-mail reminding folks of the annual Feast of Caring that included this note:

The Feast of Caring started the day with some very good news! The Bank of America Foundation just awarded Urban Ministry $12,500 for the WE shelters. In addition, a $1,000 check was received in the mail from an individual who scratched through the $100,000 needed headline in the newspaper and wrote in $99,000. (Bold added.)

Another reason to love our readers.

We've discussed before whether criminals read newspapers. Honestly, I have no idea, which means I can argue it either way.

But here's a Sheriff's Department in Wisconsin that thinks they do, according to a TV news report. At least the smart ones.

Burglars are using information from the newspaper to hit homes where they know no one will be home. Last night we told you about burglars in Stoughton who police believe are checking the obituaries and targeting people at funerals.

Tonight we have evidence that the problem is spreading across Dane County and the thieves responsible are taking any information they can get from the newspaper.

For years, I've heard about this. We have had friends housesit when we have attended family funerals.

Snopes addresses it, too. 

I'm always amused when people who disagree with me tell me what I am really thinking or why I really did something. On Twitter, I asked if there was a technical name for this type of argument, other than specious. What I discovered, of course, is that everyone's a jokester: 

LadySiren: "Sounds like a job for the Psychic Frenemities Network"

Haikuhijinks: "Argu-meants"

And for the win, kevglobal: "Clair-annoyance"

When the mayor-elect suggested a retired general would be a good choice as police chief, I assumed he was merely thinking outside the box to inspire his fellow council members to think more creatively. I didn't think he was serious. After all, while they may be expert at many things, military leaders aren't necessarily known for crime fighting and crime prevention, unless they've been MPs. And they aren't known for cutting spending either, which is another of the council's aims.

I do admit, though, that I relish the idea of a retired general in charge. Can you imagine some of the exchanges between the retired general and the council?

Then I remembered that Greensboro already has a well-decorated general in its midst, Gen. Nathanael Greene. Some may think he's dead, but they would be wrong. He's alive, well and engaged with what's going on in Greensboro. He's responsive to people, and best of all, he was "one of the most trusted generals in the Revolutionary War." Isn't that what people think we need? Heck, we already have a statue of him downtown.

Perfect choice.

To send everyone into the weekend on a positive note, check out the Joke's on You. It is routinely one of the best features in the Friday paper and Web site. The smiles multiply on the blog because all of the cartoon captions are listed, and we're talking hundreds of entries. (With due respect to Tim and his sick sense of humor, he doesn't always pick the best ones.)

The feature has now crossed the pond two weeks in a row: one entry from a 14-year-old in Northern Ireland and one from a man from Brighton, England.

Keep them coming.

If you're a regular reader of this Web site -- or just about any other news Web site for that matter -- you're used to commenters going all postal on other commenters, people mentioned in stories and us. (Examples from today.)

Whenever we think people have gone beyond the pale, we delete their comments. We probably don't delete enough of them. They then respond by calling us censors and worse. (Doesn't hurt our feelings.) When we know a story will set off the worse in us, we don't open it for comments at all.

So, commenters who get their jollies by insulting others need to be aware that more and more people who are more thin-skinned than others are reading comments. And doing something about it.

When we began publishing the break-in map, a few readers wrote in requesting we publish a list of everyone arrested each week, too.

In the trade, that’s called a crime blotter. Lots of newspapers publish them.

We don’t.

We know that arrests are public information, and a list of them every week would certainly be well-read. That’s the allure of crime blotters.

I see the delicious gossipy value of being able to read the names of everyone arrested. Problem is, I don’t see any public service value of publishing a list of them in the newspaper. And, out of fairness, if we write about a person’s arrest, don’t we have an obligation to write about the disposition of his case? Some of these folks are acquitted, after all. We have a hard enough time trying to keep up with arrests we do publish. Doing it for the dozens of arrests made each week would strain a staff the size of the New York Times, much less ours.

I know we publish "Guilford County's Most Wanted," which some may say is the same thing. I consider it different. Those are folks who law enforcement officers are looking for.

If you're interested, the Greensboro Police Department provides a nifty service online. Browsing through a few days certainly gives you an idea of how the police department must spend its time. Sad, really. 

I’m reading our coverage of the historic Greensboro Sit-Ins in February 1960. (They were actually referred to as the "sitdowns" in the paper.)

While we now celebrate the national significance of the actions of the four A&T students on Feb. 1, the newspapers here didn't seem all that excited at the time. The stories were short, the reporting was bare bones, and the students involved were rarely quoted. For such a dramatic event, the stories were almost boring. For the first several days, they didn't even make the front page.

The protests finally did make A1 of the Greensboro Daily News on Feb. 7.

I wasn't here in 1960, but using the clarity of hindsight, I can say that the sit-ins were seriously underplayed. Like, duh.

But in case you aren’t convinced that times have changed since 1960, consider the political incorrectness of “Today’s Chuckle” that is also on that Feb. 7, 1960, front page: Every man needs a wife because many things go wrong that one can’t blame on the government.

Well, I guess we can still blame the government for most things.

Some of the stories are here.

Sometimes investigative reporting break-throughs come from slogging through documents, from sources passing along information and from naked eye observation. Sometimes it comes from being lucky.

And we all know that luck is the residue of design.

Taft Wireback's story last week is just such an example. Taft was researching a story about the hydroelectric plants on the Deep River when he came across a ruling Judge Calvin Murphy made in a lawsuit filed by the power plants against the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority. He began taking notes and, as part of that, he Googled the judge by name to make sure he was from Charlotte. 

There, he found a link that stated that Sen. Kay Hagan had recommended Murphy to a seat on the federal bench just nine days before the ruling. Normally, that wouldn't be particularly pertinent -- interesting but not pertinent -- except for Hagan's husband, Chip. Chip is listed as a managing member of one of the hydroelectric plants that brought the suit, a suit in which Murphy ruled in the plants' favor.

His story suddenly got more interesting.

For want of a Google.

Would he have discovered it another way? Probably eventually. Perhaps after Murphy had been appointed.