Detail from a front page of The Onion, as featured in "Our Front Pages" (simonandschuster.com).

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For two decades and counting now, the satirical news source The Onion has been churning out the headlines that make you laugh or cry or both.

“Amish Give Up.” “Inner Cities to Receive Soothing Heroin.” “Cheney Vows to Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected.” “God Outdoes Terrorists.”

And, the day after last year’s presidential election: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Oh, my.

It all started as a college humor paper in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, it’s everywhere.

This hour, On Point: Hot headlines and the truth in bleak humor. We’ll peel back The Onion.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Joe Garden, features editor for The Onion. He joined the staff in 1993, after dropping out of the University of Wisconsin, when the paper was still produced out of Madison. The Onion’s new book is “Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude From America’s Finest News Source.”

Also from New York we’re joined by Seth Reiss, a staff writer for The Onion. He’s been on staff for three years, at the New York base The Onion has had since 2001.

From Pasadena, Calif., we’re joined by Robert Niles, editor at the Online Journalism Review, published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

And with us in our studio is star On Point intern Suzanne Merkelson, late, great editor-in-chief of The Colby Echo in Waterville, Maine.

What’s your question about the new banking regulations? About the financial markets and their future? About the coverage of Adam and David?

Event details are here. You’ll hear the taped segment broadcast on air Thursday, June 25.

Newspapers are sold on Jan. 21, 2009, in the Studio City area of Los Angeles. (AP)

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After years in trouble, American newspapers are finally up against the wall.

Advertising, vanished. Profits, gone. Losses, mounting very rapidly. Around the country, newsrooms are being hollowed out, papers are shrinking, some are letting go of daily publication. Some are going away.

So, what if? What if your local newspaper just disappeared? In a world of red ink, bankruptcies, layoffs and cutbacks, it’s possible. So, what then?

This hour, On Point: Newspapers going down — and radical steps for radical times in the news business.

You can join the conversation. Do you see a future for the newspaper as we know it? And what steps up if newspapers go down?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and author of the blog PressThink, where he writes about the future of the press. He’s also author of the book “What Are Journalists For?”

Also joining us from New York is David Folkenflik, media reporter for NPR. He’s just completed a two-part series on the future of newspapers. Before he joined NPR in 2004, he spent more than a decade at The Baltimore Sun.

And joining us from San Diego is Andrew Donohue, co-executive editor of the non-profit investigative news site, Voice of San Diego.

From The Daily Dish (courtesy of TheAtlantic.com).

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The news for the American newspaper industry just gets worse. As circulation numbers continue to slide, once-mighty dailies are cutting more staff and closing bureaus.

And while newspapers continue to lose readers as fast as trees in autumn shed their leaves, a new journalistic landscape is taking shape. There are fewer professional reporters reporting to fewer seasoned editors. But as the traditional journalistic gate-keepers retreat, the Internet is swelling with millions of bloggers and new forms of online publishing.

For many, this is cause for alarm. But one of the blogosphere’s — and print journalism’s — brightest lights, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, makes some bold claims for blogs in a new essay. He says the best kind of blogging could lead to a “golden era for journalism.”

Is he right? This hour, On Point: The state of blogging and the fate of journalism.

You can join the conversation. Where do you get your news? Do you read blogs? What’s lost, and what’s gained, in an era of shrinking newspapers and booming blogs? Tell us what you think.

-Anthony Brooks, guest host

Guests:

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of the widely-read blog The Daily Dish. His essay “Why I Blog,” in which he foresees a new “golden era for journalism,” appears in The Atlantic’s November issue. He’s a former editor of The New Republic and author of several books, most recently “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. In 2006 he wrote an essay for The New Yorker on blogging and online journalism titled “Amateur Hour.” His most recent book is “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.”

Tina Brown, founder and editor in chief of The Daily Beast. She is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines, and is the author of “The Diana Chronicles.”

More links:

David Carr mourns old media’s decline in his New York Times column this morning:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people…. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago….

He goes on to note:

The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.

This week, Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, announced he’s stepping down after 17 years at the helm.

Forty-four years total at the newspaper, where he arrived as a summer intern in 1964.

Many of the stories he’s had a hand in are defining: Watergate. Secret CIA prisons. Walter Reed. The Post has won 25 Pulitzers with Downie in charge — six this year.

But he’s not without some regrets. And he’s leaving at an uncertain time for newspapers — and for the news.

This hour, On Point: Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.

- Guest host, Jane Clayson

Guest:

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post.

The Australian Rupert Murdoch, global press baron, plays hardball and big money with the news media on several continents. These days, he’s up to his elbows in American media.

If you read The Wall Street Journal, which he now owns, you’ve seen the changes. Whether you watch or avoid Fox News, you know its impact. And those are just a start.

At a time when the news business is in turmoil, there’s a hot debate over whether Rupert Murdoch’s money is saving or wrecking American journalism.

This hour, On Point: Rupert Murdoch and the news media in America.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Koblin, a reporter covering Rupert Murdoch for the New York Observer.

Robert McChesney, professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of “Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media” and “Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy.”

Dean Starkman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal from 1996 through 2004, he runs Columbia Journalism Review’s blog “The Audit,” where he has been closely tracking the changes at the Journal under Murdoch.

James T. Madore, reporter at Newsday covering the bids by Murdoch and others to buy the paper.