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Death of Newspapers Won't Kill the News

By Harry Kimball, Newser Staff

Posted Apr 6, 2009 2:06 PM CDT

(Newser) – Before newspapers held sway over politicians and maintained monopolies under federal anti-trust exemptions, they were a service people were willing to pay for, Michael Kinsley writes in the Washington Post. Even if “technology is on the verge of removing some traditionally vital organs of the body politic,” they will be replaced by what people want, and want to pay for. “If the New York Times disappears,” he says, “there will still be news.”

Ideas have been floated to save the industry, from government help to non-profit status. But “a newspaper industry that was a ward of the state or of high-minded foundations would be sadly compromised,” Kinsley writes. More people are reading news than ever, albeit online. “There is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper.”

[Images (3)]

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A pedestrian walks past a Chicago Sun-Times newspaper box. (AP Photo)

Detroit Free Press and Detroit News newspaper boxes are shown in Detroit. (AP Photo)

A reporter at the the Seattle Times looks over the newspaper as he sits in the newsroom. (AP Photo)

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But will there be a Baghdad bureau? Will there be resources to expose a future Watergate? Will you be able to get your news straight and not in an ideological fog of blogs? Yes, why not—if there are customers for these things.
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If you had told one of the great newspaper moguls of the past that someday it would be possible to publish a newspaper without paying anything for paper, printing and delivery, he would not have predicted that this would mean catastrophe. -

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