The long-term prospects for US newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times "may more profoundly affect the destiny of the United States" than those of the key banks that seem critical to resolving the financial crisis, according to Albert R. Hunt, writing in the International Herald Tribune. The "devastation" of the industry has led to the decimation of overseas and Washington coverage, he believes.

He criticises those "younger, upscale consumers" who feel that it does not matter that newspapers are suffering because the Internet produces a "plethora of news and information," arguing that no Internet outlets have the resources to write a story such as the Washington Post's investigation into the maltreatment of wounded army veterans at the Walter Reed Medical Center, which produced real changes. "Most scandals and revelations of corruption are exposed by newspapers," he stresses, and quotes Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, who asserts that "about 85 percent of the news people get is initially generated by newspapers."

Hunt believes that rather than providing good quality news, websites and blogs often polarize. But he does not see an obvious answer to the newspaper industry's struggles. "Solutions are plentiful and thin," he asserts.

But for Clay Shirky, "society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." He claims that as the problem that the publishing industry was created to solve: the "incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public," has been solved, there is little reason trying to persist pushing print products. Competition used to be limited by the expense of a printing press, while as now anyone can publish online.

Shirky discusses the possible solutions open to newspapers, such as pay walls or micropayments, and concludes that none of them will work. "There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke." Rather, he believes, "organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data."

What Albert R. Hunt and Clay Shirky have to say is actually not so different in principle. For both, good quality journalism is crucial to a democratic society, and both want to maintain it at al costs. Shirky admits that print media currently does "much of society's heavy journalistic lifting," and that they are widely read. Where they disagree, is in the way this journalism is delivered. Shirky asserts that "for a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable," but now he believes that as newspapers' business model becomes less tenable, that the focus should shift to strengthening journalism in a more general sense. Hunt is convinced, however, that good journalism cannot survive without newspapers.

Nobody knows whether newspapers will find a way to continue in their present form, or whether other alternative news sources will find sufficient resources to be truly competitive. But as long as there are enough people who believe in journalism's value to a democracy, we can hope that society will not suffer too much.

Source: International Herald Tribune, Shirky.com