Take comfort. It was ever thus. Here’s the editor of the British Spy or Derby Post-Man writing in the 1720s, when filling space was a little more challenging than it is today:

When the Mails fail us and the people are inactive at home, when Great Folks are so ill-natur’d as neither to marry nor die nor beget children, we are upon the search for that scarce commodity called wit, which ’tis well known, is in these Days as hard to come at in any week (especially in Derby) as Intelligence.

Or maybe Derby’s just a tough market?