Every few years, you have a spate of silly billionaires trying to make money by “saving” journalism, which has as much of a chance as “saving” the automats.

Forbes has a silly kissy-faced piece proclaiming that David Hoffmann is saving a dead profession. Not happening.

On some level, David Hoffmann’s boast is almost touching. The billionaire tells Forbes he is “going to save newspapers in America,” fresh off gaining control of more than a hundred titles and a big stake in Lee Enterprises, one of the last mid‑size chains still standing. It is the kind of grandiose declaration that makes business reporters swoon and industry veterans wince.

Because if you’ve been around newspapers long enough, you’ve heard this story before. The names change. The script doesn’t.

To me, the better comparison isn’t to some heroic industrialist from the glory days of print. It’s to the Automat.

In the early and mid‑20th century, Horn & Hardart’s Automats were sold as the future of eating. You walked into a gleaming hall of chrome and glass, dropped a few nickels into a wall of little doors, and pulled out hot food with no waiter, no fuss, and the quiet thrill of machinery doing something magical for you.

At their peak, Horn & Hardart was the largest restaurant chain in the United States, with flagship Automats sitting on prime corners in New York and Philadelphia. Office workers timed their days around them. Families treated them as an outing. They were cheap, fast, and woven into urban life so tightly that it was hard to imagine city eating without them.

And then the conditions shifted.

Postwar suburbs pulled people out of dense downtowns. Fast‑food drive‑throughs and coffee shops slipped into new routines. Labour and ingredient costs rose. Horn & Hardart tried to compensate the way late‑stage industries always do: automate more, cut quality, tinker with the format while insisting nothing essential had changed.

Customers noticed. The food wasn’t as good. The magic faded. The chain slid into a long decline and finally closed its last Automat in 1991.

But the idea of the Automat never completely disappeared. Today you can find its DNA in a handful of high‑tech “automat‑style” concepts: a kiosk in Brooklyn, a pickup wall in an airport, an Instagram‑friendly nostalgia project. They’re fun. They’re niche. They are not, and will never again be, the backbone of urban dining.

That’s exactly where newspapers are now.

For most of the 20th century, newspapers in North America were not quaint hobbies for billionaires. They were infrastructure.

A city paper sat on almost every kitchen table and newsroom decisions shaped what counted as public reality. Classifieds, department store ads, and near‑monopoly local audiences made the business wildly profitable. You didn’t “save” newspapers back then. They saved you, by throwing off enough cash that even badly run operations muddled through.

The rituals were as predictable as the Automat’s coffee line. The morning door thump. The commute flip‑through. The evening newsstand check. If you cared about politics, sports, or the obituaries, you built your habits around print.

Then the conditions shifted.

Platforms captured attention and ad dollars; Google and Facebook carved away the classifieds and display revenue that had subsidized journalism for decades. People under forty grew up with search bars and social feeds, not front pages. Local monopolies shattered into an attention free‑for‑all, and the old cross‑subsidy, lifestyle and ads paying for courts and councils, blew apart.

The result is what we politely call “the decline of newspapers.” Thousands of titles have closed outright; others limp along as “ghost newspapers” with a brand but barely a newsroom. The audience that remains is disproportionately older. In many markets, the median print reader is somewhere in their mid‑50s or beyond, reading because they always have, not because the product fits how information actually moves now.

That is a habit market, not a growth market.

You can raise prices on that cohort. You can guilt‑trip them about “supporting local journalism.” You can sell them commemorative front pages and “subscriber‑exclusive” podcasts. But you cannot pretend they are the leading edge of a great regeneration. Any more than the last die‑hard Automat fans in the 1980s were proof that cafeteria coin‑walls were the future of restaurants.

Enter Hoffmann and his peers.

In the Forbes telling, Hoffmann’s $50 million injection into Lee Enterprises, lowering interest costs, easing debt, buying him effective control, is framed as an act of salvation, not what it also obviously is: a calculated distressed‑asset play. The language hits every familiar note. He is “saving local news.” He believes he has found the model that will “make newspapers thrive again.”

The operational details are equally familiar. Consolidate printing plants. Sell off buildings. Cut unprofitable print days. Emphasize “hyperlocal” coverage and digital subscriptions. Dress the whole package in democracy talk about how local papers are bulwarks against corruption and misinformation.

None of those moves are irrational, if what you own is a shrinking habit market you intend to manage for cash. What’s irrational is the insistence that this adds up to a renaissance.

Asset‑squeezing can extend runway. It can turn a flailing chain into something that throws off enough money for a patient owner. But it cannot reverse the basic fact that most people under middle age simply do not live information lives arranged around a daily newspaper. Treating a mid‑50s readership as the seedbed of the future is like treating the last Automat on 42nd Street as proof that Horn & Hardart is poised for a global comeback.

You can, of course, open a small Automat today and make it work. Put it in a dense neighbourhood, give it decent food, and rely on novelty, convenience, or nostalgia to draw in a steady trickle of customers. But you would be delusional to look at that and conclude that the entire restaurant industry is therefore on the verge of reverting to coin‑operated walls of creamed spinach.

Yet that is exactly the leap billionaire newspaper owners (who made their fortunes in other industries), and many of the journalists who write about them, keep trying to make.

This is where the delusion really lives: in confusing habit with demand.

A habit market is what you get when people keep using a product because it has been folded into their routines for years. They aren’t evangelists; they’re on autopilot. A growth market is what you get when people adopt something because it fits the world as it is now and solves problems in a way nothing older does.

Automats, at the end, were pure habit. A shrinking pool of office workers and retirees still showed up because they always had, even as the chain cut quality and the city around them reorganized itself around entirely different ways of eating. That loyalty was real, but it was backward‑looking: attachment to a ritual, not evidence of a technology waiting to conquer the future.

Newspapers are in the same place. The remaining print (and many e‑edition) readers are largely mid‑50s and up, repeating a pattern they learned before the internet, turn pages, scan headlines, feel informed. That habit has emotional weight. It has identity attached to it. But it does not tell you what a 25‑year‑old, raised on phones and feeds, will ever want from a news product.

Billionaire “saviors” keep treating that habit base as if it were a growth engine. They buy chains, squeeze out costs, dress the whole thing in civic rhetoric, and then behave as if the numbers validate a turnaround story instead of a carefully‑managed wind‑down. The reality is more mundane and more brutal: you can make decent money serving the last Automat regulars, or the last generation of print loyalists, but you cannot turn that into the new default operating system of public life.

We are in the high‑nostalgia, low‑utility phase of the Automat age of news. There will be survivors. There will be niches. There will be clever reuses of the machinery. But Horn & Hardart is not coming back, and neither is the age when a single city newspaper could credibly claim to define reality for everyone who mattered.

The sooner we stop reading too much into the last Automats and the last print subscribers, the sooner we can get on with building things that actually match the world we live in now.