There has been a lot of discussion as to whether newspapers as they currently exist can survive the age of the internet.  I want to suggest that no, they won’t, and further, that this is a good thing.  A very good thing.
Americans have gotten news by a variety of ways throughout our history.  During Revolutionary times printing was relatively slow, papers were expensive, and most people had access to them in public lace such as taverns or coffee houses.  The penny press made them widely and cheaply available, but again, subject to considerations of profitability.  As corporations took over more and more papers from individual and family owners, profitability became the only real value served by newspapers.  And not just the paper’s profitability.  What mattered more was the profitability of the corporations owning the papers.  This meant that the media were only subsidiaries of corporations often with even more important holdings in areas like defense.
Their capacity to serve citizens, never really high, plummeted.
The years of the Bush Administration, with its ideology of big business can do no wrong,  have seen many newspapers serving the interests behind political power, with the same concern for truth, as do state owned papers in less free societies.  Reporters simply passed on press releases and rarely gave much effort to real reporting.  Even family owned corporations such as the New York Times became such mouthpieces for the Republican oligarchy that I will never subscribe to it again.  This abasement occurred after savaging the Clinton administration for far smaller sins.
Corporations are incapable of serving citizens, only consumers.  Not only that, they seek a lowest common denominator in order to gin up subscriptions and therefore make the most money off advertising.  They have done inordinate harm to the American polity.  Of course exceptions exist (I think of McClatchy), but this is the bigger picture.
Good riddance to a corporate press.  May the rest of corporate involvement with news media go the same way – and as quickly as possible.
What can take its place?  Many of the best blogs now do serious investigative work – far more than most reporters, it seems.  Finding reliable blogs that treat subjects in depth remains a challenge, (as a start I recommend Digby and Greenwald) but the same holds for more traditional news, and many of our problems have been made worse by thinking the traditional media was somehow other than a tool for the government and its beneficiaries.
Yet newspapers serve vital purposes in informing citizens of public affairs and controversies.  So far blogs seem less able to do this as well.  E are in a time of creative restructuring, because without good news sources, good blogs are difficult to maintain.
A professional news media must somehow continue to exist.
My guess is that newspapers may become services provided by civil society rather than the market in any strong sense.  Foundations and private contributions could become major funders and the resulting papers will serve Americans as citizens.  There will be fewer readers as stories become more substantive. This smaller readership will consist of people who take their role as citizen relatively seriously.   I suggest this will be a good thing.  These stories will then be disseminated by citizens and  blogs and other means to the wider audience.
Papers with such a base could hardly help from doing a better job pf reporting than the current corporate press.  As far as I am concerned, it cannot disappear quickly enough