They were often coveted as essential tools to gain voter interest and trust, especially in small, local races where candidates are unknown. But newspaper endorsements may be losing steam in an age where candidates can circumvent the press more and more via websites, Twitter, Facebook and direct e-mails.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a former White House correspondent, penned a piece for The Wall Street Journal in which he takes note of the trend, citing Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Scott, who declined to sit down with newspaper editorial boards and still won the GOP nomination.

Writes Brown:

The expectation is that Mr. Scott, a former health care executive who won the GOP nomination over Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum with virtually no newspaper endorsements, won't bother to meet with the editorial boards in search of their backing for the November election, either.

Bad-mouthing the news media has been a tried-and-true tactic for political candidates since printing began, but ignoring them altogether is a potentially new step in the evolution of American politics.

The operative question is whether such a strategy makes sense in these days of 24/7 news cycles, cable television and the Internet, when voters get their information from a variety of sources and to a much lesser degree from the traditional news media, especially newspapers.

Will other candidates decide, too, that meeting with the folks who decide newspaper endorsements isn't worth their time or trouble?

He later adds:

... in an era when trust of the news media is close to all-time lows and readership has fallen like a rock, most of the newspapers that have survived are shells of their former selves when it comes to clout in their communities and their financial health.

The papers' economics matter because newspapers that are worried about their existence are more likely to be wary of alienating any potential readers.

Once upon a time, newspaper endorsements were a big deal to candidates for higher office because there was a belief that the news media were a good proxy for the peoples' views and values.

But today, that arguably is no longer the case. A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll this month found that only 13% of voters had a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the national news media, less than the portion who had confidence in the federal government, the auto industry or the energy industry, and only four percentage points better than the 9% who felt that way about Congress.