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分享一个知识点解析： Reader question: In this sentence – Traditional newspapers and magazines are going to the dogs – what does “going to the dogs” mean exactly? My comments: Have you ever taken food from a restaurant? Waiters and waitresses wrap it up into little boxes for you to take away with and those boxes are called “doggy bags”. Why? Because presumably when people first started asking for the bags, they said they wanted to take the food they couldn’t eat to feed their dogs at home. Presumably because leftover food wasn’t considered fit for people but were good for their best friend. Anyways, that’s the literal meaning of “going to the dogs”, an age-old American (I think) idiom widely used on both sides of the Atlantic. Figuratively, the idiom can be used on people or businesses. If a person is said to be going to the dogs, he’s suffering either poor health, financial trouble or some other dire situation. In the case of newspapers and magazines going to the dogs, it means that in face of growing competition from online, the traditional print media are losing customers, some even facing bankruptcy. For example, the hundred-year old Seattle Pose-Intelligencer, covering the State of Washington and other areas, last month closed its print paper altogether and is now Internet-only. In short, if something is going to the dogs, it’s in serious decline, wasting away or staring rack and ruin downright in the face. | 
