Listen, if these dailies go under (which is unlikely), that’s not going to be good for anybody. But maybe they could do a much better job of catching up to today’s reality. Perhaps getting rid of mandatory registration will help.

Unfortunately, “today’s realities” are clashing with the timeless (pun intended) realities that a newspaper is a business. And with the Internet, you’re giving away content. And nobody makes money to keep a staff of writers by giving it away.

Internet ads just don’t do the trick the way print advertising does, for some reason (it’s not my expertise). And a print newspaper makes most of its profit from ads. The money from subscription and newsstand sales is a fraction of that, but it’s often the fraqction that makes a difference between red and black in the ledger books.

Subscription is a desperate attempt to channel the online readership better, the better to put ads in front of them that they’ll see and use.

It’s not pretty, but I can’t blame them for trying. Publishing a newspaper is famously the business of buying paper at $1 a ton and selling it at $3 a ton, or some such cliche. How do you squeeze that extra $2 a ton out of the Internet?

There are few other institutions I can think of that so clearly represent the “pinnacle” of their profession. There are many great hospitals, many great sports teams. But journalism in this country is pretty much a single track, and at the top of the hill is 43rd Street. Unfortunately for all the rest of us, that means a great many of the people who arrive there do so with a great deal of strangeness and ego, which can get in the way of reporting the news.