'Writers' and 'writing' as in English literature, fiction, drama, 'belle lettre' are nearly dead. For some exceptions, might sell some romance novels or screen plays and write 'news' drawing on morality plays and formula fiction.

Otherwise, broadly, first-cut, essentially the whole pile from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ..., Dickens, James, to the present and their goals, techniques, values, and traditions are dead economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally -- kaput.

Why? Still in simple terms, they never made it into the 20th century with its standards of information safety and efficacy from mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, medicine, and law of the early 20th century. E.g., for learning about people, f'get about Shakespeare, ..., and just read clinical psychology. Or, don't read 'writer' Henry James and read his brother psychologist William James instead.

The 'writers' didn't have to know much and, instead, wrote 'art' as in the 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. For the reader, it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people.

So, 'literature' is now for light entertainment. No one would try to do anything serious -- design an airplane, drug, computer system, bridge -- using the techniques of literature.

In the recent past, for media, the content was still from "the medium is the message". So, could pass out content, one size fits millions. Such content had to be of such broad interest and, thus, so superficial that it could be from a 'writer' who actually didn't know much about the subject.

Commonly a reader who actually knows something about subject X when reading work of a newsie about X sees right away that the newsie understands next to nothing about X and gets a lot wrong.

Now in great contrast, for each narrow topic, there are many experts who, as on Wikipedia, HN, Stack Overflow, eGullet, various blogs and fora, can, just for fun, write material of much higher quality for free and do.

So there are over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati and some unknown, large number of long tail Web sites so that the focused content is far beyond the old, one size fits millions.

Yes, 'literature' is gathering dust on the library shelves and otherwise nearly dead. We are losing nothing of any value. It should have died over 100 years ago. RIP.

And we are losing something dangerous that has profoundly hurt our democracy for over 150 years: We're losing the work of the newsies who just gush their emotions and otherwise distort and manipulate to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, and pretend that they are contributing to an 'informed electorate'. They've been building a massively, deliberately un/misinformed electorate with consequences -- the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the 1929 market crash, the Great Depression and, thus, WWII, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the Great Recession, and more. I will leave details as an exercise. Hint: The Civil War started before Lincoln even took office and from essentially only the deliberately deceptive, inflammatory work of the newsies.

There's an important word about 'fiction': It ain't true. Then, even if in some case by accident it is true, there's no evidence, certainly no proof. It's junk best left on the scrapheap of history from long, ignorant, efforts in the struggle to build civilization.

The newsies have been among the most dangerous, destructive, and contemptible people in our democracy.