EXPRESS, COMMUTER NEWSPAPER PUBLISHED BY THE WASHINGTON POST, SHUTS DOWN AFTER 16 YEARS; INSULTS ITS READERS ON THE WAY OUT:

Colorful and lively, Express was designed to be a fast read for public-transit commuters each morning, especially people who didn’t subscribe to The Post. It featured eye-catching and sometimes cheeky cover illustrations that highlighted a single news story or trend, often one underplayed by The Post or ignored by TV newscasts.

But its circulation has declined in recent years, falling to around 130,000 copies a day this year. The drop reflected, in part, falling Metro ridership, which has been driven by a switch to home telework, riding-sharing services and other means of transportation, Caccavaro said.

In the end, however, Express may have been done in by a technological change within the Metro system itself: WiFi. The wiring of the transportation system has enabled riders to stay on their smartphones throughout their trips, dooming a printed paper like Express and others as many travelers’ companion.

In a farewell column that will be published in Express on Thursday, Caccavaro, the paper’s founding editor, noted this change. “This Monday morning, as I rode the train to work … three people on my crowded Blue Line train were reading Express (thank you!),” he wrote. “One man had his nose in an old-fashioned book. Almost everyone else was staring at a phone.”

And that was a sore-spot apparently. Very apparently — as this is the cover the editors of Express chose to go out on:

Well, yes, I do happen to enjoy my stinkin’ iPhone and iPad. I like portable devices that allow me the choice of reading every news source on the planet, instead of just one, and then, if I wish to do so, share what I’ve read with others, all done wirelessly, along with dozens of other things, both simple and complex. And the beleaguered commuters in DC obviously do, too. (At least until electricity is banned by President Ocasio-Cortez.)

Once again though, a newspaper chooses to insult (and guilt-trip) its readers. As Matt Welch of Reason noted in 2012, pace Churchill, very often history is really written by the losers: “Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.”