Let’s talk about newspapers. What’s the first thing that occurs to you when you think about newspapers? Is it the insistent icy specter of death that hangs over them? Because it should be. That’s right, sports fans – newsprint is dead.

I’ll give you a second to replace the monocle that’s just popped out of your eye and to straighten your top hat. “What impertinence this jejune gazette imprecates upon that noblest of artisans, the typesetter!” I hear you cry.

It’s the unfortunate truth. I cried at the funeral, but newsprint is dead. We have entered a new era, one with no time for a daily edition, where glossy advertising and bleached-white pages are economically unenviable and ecologically thickheaded. We have entered the Post-Truth.

There was still something laudable about newsprint up until 2003. That was the year they were murdered – the only place those weapons of mass destruction they reported were ever used. They fell for the government truth hook, line and sinker, and they led us into war. The Doves cowered and the Hawks crowed, and suddenly, it was bombs over Baghdad all over again, just like in 1990 and then in 2000 (with the release of Stankonia.)

It was 2003 that was the end of the Truth proclaimed from on high. Newsprint only ever existed as a way to get information from those who knew to those who didn’t – and when those who knew started lying, en masse and in lockstep, there was nothing they could do.

Don’t get me wrong – powerful people have always lied. It’s practically their job. But this coordinated prevarication, combined with the fact that thanks to alternative media like the Internet and the BBC it was clear that we were being lied to on some level, was an insult beyond endurance.

The Truth was still out there, but it was locked away in the minds of career-oriented CIA officials and buried in washes of conspiracy-theory gibberish spewed by the far right and left equally. Newspapers, with their slow production cycle, their obedience to their advertisers, and their need to preserve good public relations with their readers and their sources, couldn’t keep up with the ever-fleeter Truth, and so they just took the lie and ran with it.

So ended 304 years of great cheaply printed American tradition. Newspapers are over. According to the New York Times, on average every newspaper in America lost about 5 percent of their circulation last year. Also, in a bit of news not reported in the New York Times, on Oct. 23 their stock was evaluated and rerated as “junk.”

The New York Times is dying. Every other newspaper is barely clinging to readers or else slip sliding merrily to hell. Some are making “drastic cuts to improve profitability,” but reducing the quality of the product isn’t going to improve their situation. All they’re doing at this point is using the last oxygen in the casket.

Which leaves us the question: Where to now?

The radio? Please. If switching between NPR and Rush Limbaugh to get balanced coverage is your idea of a good time you need to get your head checked.

TV? No. Just no. I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone, but if you’re feeling slow today – and have a strong stomach- google the CBS News clip for Faith the Wonder Dog (hint: she’s the one with no front legs.)

Which leaves us to that great shining sore on the leprous body of technological advancement – the Internet.

This is where the Truth is hiding now, ladies and gentlemen, cleverly concealed beneath mounds of bulls**t and porn. You’ve got to go out there. You’ve got to find people you trust and read what they say. You’ve got to find the people who have been right in the past and hope they keep being right, because if you ever let them lie to you, you start the slow process of being cut out of the world.

We can’t trust anyone on anything. But we can trust some people on some things. Today you’re your own situation desk. Life in the Post-Truth calls for a little personal responsibility. But the resources in your reach exceed a thousandfold what they were twenty, ten, even five years ago.

The Truth as it was told is over. The Truth is in your grasp. Get a hold.