Great line in Matt Welch’s column in Reason about the folly of bailing out newspapers: “Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill).”

I ran out of time this morning before I had a chance to praise Jack Shaffer’s piece about newspapers’ failure to invent the web and reinvent themselves. Talk about burying the lead: His best lines came in his kicker:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

As Adrian Monck points out, this is really just another chapter in the ongoing soap opera about the culpability of journalists for the state of journalism today.

Shafer is inspired by Pablo Boczkowski’s 2004 book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers and I have in my hand his thick and thoughtful 2001 dissertation on the topic. He chronicles attempts by papers to figure out and adapt to new media as it (they) emerged, including the creation of NJ.com’s Community Connection, which I lead and which died soon after Pablo wrote his treatise. It was one attempt among many to figure out the internet. And it’s one of the indictments against my tenure in online newspapers, for it was an attempt to be too controlling over the creation of communities. In my book, I quote Clay Shirky and Mark Zuckerberg as I learned that newspapers don’t create communities but might be lucky enough to serve them.

So there were many attempts by papers to adapt. There were many mistakes. Mine were among them. And so – to address Shafer and Monck – the question remains whether newspapers tried hard enough. Shafer says they may have tried but they barked up wrong trees.

I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying. That’s not true. It’s a willful misinterpretation. If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall – and I’m not sure I do – it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.

For every honest attempt to change that Shafer and Boczkowski talk about, I saw many more efforts to avoid and even torpedo change: newspaper editors and executives who told me that it was not their job to help this internet thing, to share content with the internet, to link to anyone else on the internet, to interact with readers on the internet, to rethink their procedures because of the internet, to teach new skills because of the internet, to promote the internet, and on and on. I saw too many direct attempts to subvert the future. That’s where the fault lies.

So Shafer’s quite right that newspapers failed because they couldn’t think past seeing the web as an extension of their past – they insisted in seeing the internet in their own image. But there’s more to the story.

A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:

If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.

But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.

Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:

When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.

The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.

There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.

: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.

I was going to start a collection of the letters to readers that newspapers are publishing these days explaining every cutback and consolidation and where surviving features are moving to save paper and money because the times are tough, you know. But there are too many such letters.

Here’s one sample from the Advertiser in Louisiana. What’s scary about it is not what the paper says but what a customer says in the comments:

The article says “newspapers are not going away”, well The Daily Advertiser is. I’ve spent thousands advertising in The Advertiser over the the last eight years and have noticed a dramatic decline in returns from those ads. I quit advertising altogether last summer. People just don’t read the hard copy of The Advertiser any more.

Gulp.

Rather than telling readers what they’re not doing anymore and where they’re moving this and that – here’s where you’ll find that vital Sudoku and horoscope! – it might be better for papers to say what they are doing.

How about just saying: If it’s local, it’s here, if it’s not, it’s not.

And how about saying: If you want depth and currency and conversation and more, go online.