Science & Tech Quote by Will McDonough

McDonough’s line lands like a calm diagnosis delivered just before the fever spikes. He isn’t lamenting “technology” in the abstract; he’s sketching a two-part chain reaction: the Internet drains newspapers’ business model, then it corrodes the craft those papers once subsidized. The first claim is economic and almost banal now, but in his era it still carried the sting of inevitability. “Lost circulation” is blunt, measurable, the kind of phrase that belongs in a publisher’s report, not a romantic defense of print. That’s the point: the threat is structural, not sentimental.

The second sentence sharpens into a moral critique. “Will lead to” frames plagiarism as a predictable byproduct of the medium’s incentives: speed over verification, aggregation over original reporting, frictionless copying over newsroom discipline. McDonough’s subtext is that journalism’s ethics are partly enforced by scarcity. When access to archives, wire copy, and competitors’ work becomes instantaneous, the temptation to borrow (or outright steal) stops being an individual lapse and starts looking like an ambient hazard.

Context matters: McDonough dies in 2003, before social media fully weaponized virality and before “content” became a job category. He’s pre-Substack, pre-SEO saturation, pre-AI, yet he anticipates the way digital abundance can cheapen authorship. The quote works because it ties the economic collapse to the ethical one, implying that when institutions shrink, standards don’t merely slip; they get outcompeted.