My first mentor in journalism was Llewellyn King, a stout Rhodesian who served as publisher, editor, and ace reporter for Weekly Energy Report, the Washington newsletter at which I was a summer intern. When not purring over the phone to some congressman, King would hold forth on the business side of journalism, and he also counseled me on where to look for full-time work. Once, when he mentioned the pay differentials among various news organizations, I interjected loftily that money wasn’t important. “Don’t ever say that,” King snapped, and I never did again. From such exchanges, I grasped a fact that had escaped me while I was laboring for my college paper: A newspaper is neither a public service nor a romance; it is a business. And its editorial glories are ultimately linked to and dependent upon its commercial ones.

This verity may have lingered in the background early in my career, but during the past decade, as friends and associates have fled once-thriving newsrooms rendered grim by armies of cost cutters, it has become the defining fact of the trade. Newspapers are losing their readers and advertisers; they are laying off reporters and cutting news holes. Circulation today is equal to that of 1950, when the U.S. population was half its present size. Among adults younger than 34, only one in five has the habit of daily readership that, I had once supposed, was as easy to acquire as candy and as difficult to break as heroin addiction.

Charles Madigan, a former correspondent for United Press International and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, has compiled a series of previously published articles and essays on the decline of the American newspaper business with the aim, as he writes in an eloquent introduction, of solving the mystery of what is killing the big-city paper.

The volume, pointedly titled 30 (the numeric symbol with which typewriter-pounding reporters used to end their stories), includes pieces that range from New York Times columnist David Carr’s wry look at his own family—in which the Disney Channel and Facebook are the morning amusements—to pained examinations of the troubles of such once-proud dailies as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times.

This well-chosen collection casts a light on the American press from many perspectives—those of the local daily, the august New York Times, as well as chains like Gannett. Wherever one looks, the same debate is raging. Are newspapers losing ground because they adapted to the internet too slowly? Or, by paring story lengths and dumbing down news columns in an effort to appeal to the short attention spans molded by the Web, have newspapers been, as Slate’s Jack Shafer puts it, “embracing extinction”?