Certainly, the bottom has fallen out of the industry over the past year. To the point that some communities have no newspaper at all, and the surviving newspapers are greatly diminished, with shrunken staffs,  circumscribed reach and evaporating influence on contemporary civic debate, great or small.

It was not so 10 years ago, when the vast majority of informed people still began their day with a newspaper. Or 50 years ago, when every major metropolitan area in the country had at least two newspapers and probably more like four or five.

But to get a sense of how great the fall of newspapers in this country has been, we can turn to three quotations cited by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her excellent book on Abraham Lincoln, entitled, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

In 19th century America, newspapers were not only ubiquitous, they were indispensable.

First, Goodwin quotes Charles Ingersoll, a congressman and ambassador from Pennsylvania who lived from 1782 until 1862: Newspapers “were the daily fare of nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common that, like air and water, its uses are undervalued.”

And from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher and poet: “Look into the morning trains” … which “carry the businessmen into the city to their shops, countingrooms, workyards and warehouses.” Into every car the newsboy “unfolds his magical sheets — two pence a head his bread of knowledge costs — and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast.”

Goodwin also quotes an unidentified European visitor remarking on the American passion for newspapers in the still-young democracy. “You meet newspaper readers everywhere; and in the evening the whole city knows what twenty-four hours before lay on newswriters’ desks. … The few who cannot read can hear news discussed or read aloud in the ale- and oyster houses.”

Ah, the good old days. Newspapermen were paid pittances, and often viewed as vaguely squalid figures. But they mattered.

What made newspapers so successful in the 19th century? A monopoly on news, certainly. A near-monopoly on advertising. A known and consistent political viewpoint also drove readers to specific newspapers — Federalist, Democratic, Whig, Republican. Most of the newspapers of the 19th century didn’t bother with attempts to be unbiased, and perhaps that sort of partisanship, frowned upon in modern journalism, would have helped prop up circulation in the modern era. (Though the Daily Worker doesn’t sell many papers.)

Much of it is about technology. Of course. Print in the 21st century is struggling to survive a series of 20th century assaults that snatched away its primacy as a source for news: First, from radio, in the 1920s; then from television, after World War II; and now from the Internet, from about 1995 forward.

I believe print journalism will survive its current woes and, eventually, become known as the last repositories of responsible news-gathering. Turning 180 degrees from their early roles as the first source of news flashes and becoming the one source of information that doesn’t go from rumor to Internet quasi-reality in a few seconds.

The future of newspapers, it seems to me, will be in the sort of careful reporting that only a product as slow to come together as a daily newspaper will allow.

We never will have anything remotely like our grip on the audience that we did in the 19th century. But perhaps we can attempt to be the honest, fair, accurate and thorough arbiter of events in the 21st century.

(And, by the way, I heartily endorse Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book. It doesn’t just tell us that Abraham Lincoln was a great man, as our teachers in elementary school did. She shows us why Abraham Lincoln was a great man and perhaps the most astute politician in the history of the country. The book is a great read, and as “couldn’t-put-it-downable” as any 750-page book of recent vintage.)