I've been in the room for several of these and have no trouble believing it. The first time I can talk about was at a newspaper that hired me to get a start for them on this Internet thing. The presentation was about the rosy outlook for their industry and their business specifically. I sat there stunned for the whole thing. I knew it was 100% fabrication but they took as the gospel truth because they had paid these consultants $150,000 to tell them what they wanted to hear.

For the kids, newspapers were an ancient form of information distribution for current events like the Web is now. Read only, the events were printed on flimsy paper, bundled with advertisements, and left on doorsteps each morning. Or in the driveway, or the bushes, or a puddle. Because the delivery person would literally throw this bundle of paper at your house. You would read some of it once and throw the whole thing away because there would be another the next day. Around 2000 they started going bankrupt because people could get more information, more current and interactive and fun, on the Internet and not have more garbage to clean up afterward. Most are just websites now with quaint features like mastheads in memory of their former glory. But a few still print these bundles of waste paper and deliver them to people who like the nostalgia. A lot of the Reddit articles go to websites that used to be newspapers or represent brands that used to be newspapers who bundled the information this way. In most cases the big machines that printed all this waste paper - and gave us the term "the press" because it would literally press words onto the paper - have long since been scrapped.