Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households — two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such.
But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population.
