Earlier this week, The Salt Lake Tribune announced a plan to seek nonprofit status, shifting from a privately-owned business to a “community asset.”

Paul Huntsman — brother to the former Utah governor, 2012 GOP presidential candidate and current U.S. Ambassador to Russia of all places Jon Huntsman, Jr., — bought the Trib in 2016. The paper won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2017 for “revealing the perverse, punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University, one of Utah’s most powerful institutions.”

But Huntsman also cut the newsroom staff by a third in 2018, citing falling revenues. These days, the Trib’s newsroom carries 60 full-timers. They employed 148 in 2011. That’s a 60 percent drop in eight years!

The news, in terms of who’s buying newspapers, has gone from bad to worse since my most recent newsroom tour of duty at the New York Daily News in 2007.

I’d interviewed in Salt Lake back in the good old days when you still believed you could enjoy an entire career in newspapers. Their editor there in the 1990s, “Jay” Shelledy, loved talking about the importance of having held other occupations before becoming a reporter and an editor. Forget journalism school. You’d learn much more about your audience by working among them. It’s why I laugh whenever someone attempts to make fun of my Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for working as a bartender — as if that’s not a great job for learning what’s really going on within your neighborhood or constituency! But that’s not what we’re here to talk about now.

Heck, we’re here on Substack because the old ideas for funding journalism have become unsustainable in 2019.

By the time I started The Comic’s Comic at the end of 2007, there were about 71,000 of my colleagues still employed writing and editing for newspapers. By 2017, 32,000 of them were out of the business. So for those of us who haven’t given up, Substack offers a way to keep on plugging away at independent journalism, so long as you agree to pay for the subscription.

The other way? Going nonprofit.

The Texas Tribune, based in Austin, launched in 2009 with $4 million in seed funding and continues today as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. ProPublica, launched in 2008, has won five Pulitzer Prizes, seven George Polk Awards, four Peabody Awards, an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, two Emmy Awards, four Online Journalism Awards for General Excellence and a National Magazine Award among others. And the Poynter Institute for Media Studies owns the Tampa Bay Times. There are organizations, too, such as Report for America or the Knight Foundation that help subsidize individual reporters and collective news organizations.

These remain rare exceptions to the rule, or rather unruly nature of journalism today.

From where I sit, and have sat, it’s easy to blame it on the suits and the shareholders, looking for a profit in the news business. Because when circulation and revenues first began to slide, we all saw how the big chains managed to maintain their profit margins. But even before then, there’s always been a general uneasiness about the separation between the newsroom and the advertising side. How many small-town publishers do you figure have worried more about protecting their major advertiser when it turned out their employees had uncovered some big scoop regarding said company? I’ve witnessed this firsthand.

I’ve also seen how newspapers completely missed the boat when the Internet gave birth to the Web in 1994, giving away stories for “free” online and teaching an entire generation not to pay for their news.

Not that any of us on the front lines chose journalism for the money. Certainly not what my parents expected when I graduated with an Ivy League degree and took a job in Idaho for a newspaper with a daily/Sunday circulation that matched my annual salary of about $23,000. Back then, out there, the cost-of-living was low enough to make ends meet. And I didn’t care. I was working a newspaper beat for the love of it. To make a difference in the lives of my friends and neighbors. To fulfill civic duty.

Had I graduated from college a year or two later, however, I might have chosen a different path.

Look at that circulation chart again. In the year of the first Web browser, 1994, total newspaper circulation nationwide averaged 59.3 million on weekdays and 62.3 million copies of the Sunday paper. A decade later, those numbers slid to 54.6 and 57.8, respectively. By 2007? 50.7 and 51.2. And a decade after that, in 2017? Only 30.9 million newspapers on weekdays, and 33.9 million Sunday papers.

Digital newspaper subscriptions and visits to newspaper web sites haven’t come anywhere close to covering the lost revenues or the stories that those disappeared reporters no longer get around to covering. Especially when you look at what gets shared on Facebook — those ain’t newspaper links for the most part, no matter what titles they give themselves to sound like legitimate operations.

Oh, Facebook.

Remember when Facebook briefly hired its own editors to curate the news? Remember a few years back, when new media was all about the pivot to video? That was built upon a false premise: That Facebook view counts counted real viewers.

Old guard media companies have tripped over themselves time and time again in desperate attempts to follow the readers/viewers and hope that where they go, the money will follow. To what avail? Ask FOX what they got for their multi-million investment in MySpace. Or Disney in putting more than $400 million into VICE, only to consider it a complete investment loss now.

As the folks at Vox noted, this pattern keeps repeating itself:

Mic, which raised more than $60 million, sold for less than $5 million late last year.

Mashable, which was valued at about $250 million in 2016, sold for less than $50 million in 2017.

The properties formerly known as Gawker Media, plus the Onion and other sites, just sold for a price that’s likely well below $50 million; Univision, the TV conglomerate which sold them off, had paid $135 million for the Gawker sites alone in 2016.

We don’t (yet) know the value that Comcast, which put a collective $600 million into Vox Media (which owns this site), and BuzzFeed over the past few years, now thinks those two publishers are worth. But it’s a reasonable bet that Comcast thinks they are worth less than it thought in 2015.

Just one get-clicks-quick scheme after another. Each one a failure. Maybe not to the individuals on the other end of these payouts, but to all of us, a worthless waste of time, money and energy.

And to what end? Profits?!

Remember when former longtime CBS CEO Les Moonves said in February 2016 that Trump "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS"? Or when, just this past November, CNN’s Jeff Zucker claimed his network needed to stay on Trump as much as possible to keep viewers interested? Zucker, who gave Trump sustained primetime access to America for a decade before his election via NBC’s The Apprentice, told Vanity Fair: “People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump,’ ” he told me. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”

Whenever you’re chasing the audience, you’re losing sight of what’s actually happening what actually needs to be shared with your audience. Publishing stories based on clicks gave us years of slideshows, redirects, pop-up ads, clickbait and finally outright misdirects. It didn’t, however, fulfill its civic duty.

Some may scoff at the idea of the Salt Lake Tribune, or any news organization, as a community asset. And yet, much like healthcare or education, strong journalism preserves the overall health of the community.

As Huntsman said: “But morally, it’s the right thing to do as well. The core of our mission is local news, reporting on the facts and empowering the citizens with the best information to make the right decisions. That's what newspapers have always provided. And we can't afford as a community to ever let that resource go away.”