If you haven't yet read Eric Alterman's New Yorker piece on the "Death and the Life of the American Newspaper," it's a very good piece, though I don't really understand the focus on The Huffington Post, where many of the breaking stories are actually links to stories by other publications -- a good business model, for HuffPo (and AlterNet, and others) maybe, but not one that really replaces the newspaper. These "whither the newspaper" articles also have a tendency to twist around a crucial ambiguity: Whether they're talking about savings newspapers, or the content newspapers produce. There are a certain number of costs associated with running a newsroom. Phone bills, Dana Priest's salary, travel budgets, employee benefits, etc. Call those X. Then there are a certain number of costs associated with mashing up wood pulp, making paper out of it, imprinting that paper with ink arranged by members of the newsroom, transporting the ink-covered paper to distribution points, and delivering that paper to people's homes. Call those XY. The amount of money needed to preserve X is far less than the amount of money needed to preserve XY. It may be that the economics of home delivery newspapers don't work, but the economics of something like The Politico -- which is a massive newsroom powering an online newspaper that also produces a smaller, narrowly distributed print edition -- work just fine. Or at least don't work in a somewhat less spectacular, more manageable, fashion. But the question of whether you're preserving news or preserving newspapers is an important one in these arguments. Preserving the former requires less money, fewer advertisers, and fewer classified ads. Preserving the latter, at least in its current form, requires an economic model that's already dead.
