So, back in the U.S. with a chance to peruse what is left of American daily print journalism. It is a melancholy activity, indeed.

Measured against the sweep of history, the nosedive of U.S. print was an accelerated affair. A decade ago, American newspapers were still making a lot of money and, collectively, were probably as good as they had ever been. Maybe better. Today, they are hollowed out shells.

Seen over the perspective of the past half-dozen years, the decline seems brisk. Even precipitous. Every time I return from the UAE, newspapers I have read and known for decades seem smaller in many ways. Literally smaller.

It seems a death by inches.

I no longer remember how wide the standard newspaper page was four decades ago (wider than it was about to be), but it was not long ago that 13 inches — 78 picas — was the norm. For decades. Then came “shrinkage”.

This morning, the Los Angeles Times was 11 inches wide. The Long Beach Press Telegram and the San Bernardino Sun … 11.5 inches wide.

That always has bothered me. This horizontal shrinkage. But of greater impact is the newshole shrinkage. The disappearance of column inches.

The L.A. Times recently had a sports section of 26 columns. The LAT sports section of a decade ago had hardly cleared its throat, after 26 columns.

LAT came in five sections. A 12-page A section mostly devoted to international news, a 6-page AA section of mostly “local” news — which for LAT can be anything in the state of California — an 8-page sports section, an 8-page business section, a 12-page Calendar (features) section.

This is a newspaper that a decade ago was still felt to be one of the country’s Big Three — with the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Now? NYT still matters. Don’t think the Post much does; pretty sure LAT hardly does.

LAT still does some good journalism. Just not nearly as much of it. A story on how corporate America may be collecting as much data on you as does the NSA. Several days of coverage on the Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco.

How many stories can journalists fit into a newspaper perhaps half the size it once was? Half as many. (And many of us remember when the L.A. Times was a 200-page Sunday beast in which a Banana Republic could hardly change a vice president with LAT telling us about it.)

On the mid-major front, a quick visit to St. Louis found the Post-Dispatch to be in sad shape, too. Also sadly shrunken.

And on the suburban front, in Southern California, a once-thriving market place of a dozen newspapers in the 30,000 to 100,000 circulation range have shriveled to homogenous near nothingness.

The mastheads exist, but the local content has largely evaporated.  In the “San Bernardino” Sun the other day, local content in the 6-page sports section consisted of two small sets of results from golf clubs. About two inches of type.

What we hear, often, from people who still subscribe to newspapers is how “awful” they are. “Terrible, pitiful, empty, with nothing to read.” This has been pointed out to me a half-dozen times in a week.

Withered newspapers hardly seem a winning strategy for fighting back to prominence. But no one holds out that sort of hope for U.S. print.

Some of my colleagues are still in the industry; more are not. Many of those still working seem dispirited and fatalistic; that probably comes from remembering how good their newspaper once was, and the constant layoffs that have seen newsrooms emptying out.

And maybe they remember when the newspaper they produced was a bigger deal. Literally.