This is nonsense. Most surviving daily newspapers do virtually no “original in-depth reporting” and expose little other than the local weather, sports and crime stories, all of which are covered very nicely by TV and radio. You can “read” the news in the Chicago Tribune — which is one of the big metro papers — in five minutes, and most of what you read will be wire copy (sometimes re-edited) and syndicated features. I can’t think of any reason why the occasional “in-depth” story in Chicago reported by the Trib could not be generated equally well by an all online counterpart to the Trib — without the huge costs associated with composing, printing, distributing and disposing of the hard copies.

There are a handful of news organizations that generate the overwhelming amount of serious journalism in America — the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, USA Today (barely in this group), AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the TV networks, NPR, and a handful of syndicates that distribute features and commentary. Only a few of these outlets are newspapers, and even those are actually already hybrids: e.g., the NYT is a news service, a syndicate and already has an elaborate online edition. News and opinion magazines have already migrated to the Web to such an extent that selling the hard book is virtually an act of sentimentality. These news organizations are by and large healthy. The problem faced by the NYT and WaPo is mainly a matter of finding a way to make money on their online content. If you buy the NYT daily at your news stand, it costs you about $650 a year. If you read it online, it costs you nothing. This is absurd and simply cannot continue indefinitely. It won’t. This content is valuable and it sells. A way will be found to monetize it on the Web, even if it takes an alliance with Google.

When people cry in their beer about the demise of papers, they are usually talking about the “big” regional dailies — the Boston Globe, LATimes, Chicago Tribune, etc. Seriously, though, these papers exist because not so long ago you needed printing plants and trucks and newstands in your area to distribute the news. In a time of instant electronic communications, that’s no longer necessary to get the news. What’s so bad about the US developing three or four national newspapers, like Britain, France or Germany? Since you can mix and match content online easily, you can produce a national Times with local news segments. The transition to a model of this kind will take a bit of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s something that has been missing in the publishing industry where papers are owned by self-important families, billionaires who want their own voice, and chains that manage papers like widgets for advertisers,

In any case, putting dying papers on the public tit – which is what an indirect tax subsidy amounts to — won’t save them for long. If people don’t buy the thing, it dies anyway. Many prominent papers have been subsidized by owners for years, even decades, only to keep fading.