The repeated reference to the democratic role of established media conglomerates--"the linchpin of democracy," as you suggest--deserves more examination than passing lip-service. That newspapers have simply existed for 200 years does not speak to the role. Even a brief examination of the media's role in our democratic process would look unfavorably on the assertion; Yes, the media has been instrumental: the agitation of collective aggression has been critical prior to the Spanish-American War. Vietnam and Iraq only serves to prove the rule: media institution's are nothing more than tools for the exercise of power. The reflexive scapegoating--a.k.a reporting on the abuses they enabled--that inevitably follows is simply a further abrogation of responsibility. It follows that the decentralization of information gathering and reporting will prove far more democratic than the current centralized models; by this I mean, that the market-place of ideas will become far more open and diverse.

Here, your sloppy reference to the evolutionary process informs your article. It's a self-organizing, algorithmic process. Likewise, the competition between ideas amounts to a memetic algorithm. Foisting turgid institutions onto the public--the same public abandoning them--will not thwart the process. The memes the MSM peddles have been devalued, and people are recognizing it. The disorder and chaos is freedom. The sound of individuals freely making alternative arrangements with the retreat of power conferred on centralized organizations--may they choke fully on their structural costs.

Despite the mystique of the news business, most of the work of daily newspapers is the simple business of meat-and-potatoes journalism – going to meetings, monitoring government, writing stories about people in our community and, on a good day, exposing something that has gone amiss. And all of this needs to be written in a clear, understandable style. On a day-to-day basis it’s a fairly simple product.
Readers crave information. We are up to our eyes in uniformed opinion and analysis.
Nationally over the past 50-60 years daily newspaper owners have made fairly hefty profits and have, on the side, been able to fund newsrooms full of professional journalists who are adept at reporting, editing, weighing information and writing quickly and clearly. The downside is that newspaper owners, until the last couple of years, haven’t seen the need to adapt their business model to problems that starting emerging as long as 20 years ago. They have let the simple small well display advertisement slip away with out a fight.
It’s the business model that has failed, not the journalism model. I don’t see how scattered, part-time bloggers on politically loaded websites are going to fill the same information need as newspaper reporters.
As our Seattle daily newspapers devolve, it will be sad to see the loss of simple reporters who work their beats, attend meetings and work the phones.
Democracy will still be healthy. It just will be dumber.

Do you read the paper, Lytton? 50 years ago, I imagine reality was probably much closer to the ideal you espouse, but we live in an era of source journalist, and I don't see how it could be any dumber. The current newspapers are nothing more than out-lets for "government as a source of information" and "industry as a source of information." They tap into their "source"--an established "authority" with appropriate rank and privilege--and quote the source. By and large, newspapers report sourced opinion; not a principled and rigorous analysis of the facts.

Your straw-man--"scattered, part-time bloggers on politically loaded websites"--doesn't even approximate the truth. My neighborhood paper, The West Seattle Herald, though amateurish at present, is in a far better position--financially and geographically--to report on civic matters as they pertain to me and my community. On occasion, the free dailies produce something of civic worth. Competition will raise quality in time.

Will people continue to project "opinion" as reality? Yes. It didn't stop you! I think, overall, the quality of "informed comment" has risen, though one must wade through the muck and the rancor--when doesn't one? Case in point, at the height of the housing bubble the P-I was quoting real-estate agents, while a number of independents were shifting the data and making rigorous arguments as to the speculative nature. Information is fundamentally worthless, if it does not produce acceptable real world results. One will have to take a certain responsibility to inform one's self, but that will be better for democracy. Stop being so lazy!

I have first-hand experience at what was essentially a failure having been a part of the early team at Sidewalk. Myopia of a different sort than newspapers killed Sidewalk. More recently, I've taken the lessons from that experience (i.e., often doing the opposite) and have managed to create a mildly profitable local Internet media site. Fundamentally, it's about having a sales model that can support a substantive journalistic enterprise.

Most of the discussion I see on the topic of making local journalism viable focuses on the cost side of the equation rather than taking a hard look at the often flawed sales models of legacy media. I wrote a piece for Jeff Jarvis' NewsInnovation site entitled "Ten Point Plan for (Re)building a successful local media salesforce" you can see at http://newsinnovation.com/2009/01/26/ten-point-plan-to-rebuilding-a-successful-local-media-salesforce/. It was a follow-up to an earlier piece "Five Fatal Flaws killing local Internet Plays". The innovation on the production side of local Internet media is terrific. The same can't be said for the business side and that is what is crushing the PI and others.

The analogy that comes to mind is the mainframe & minicomputer companies. Most of them are extinct dinosaurs now. In contrast, IBM used its near-death experience to fundamentally rethink what kind of company they were and had a stunning turnaround. I suspect we'll see the same with newspaper companies - many will die or their assets will get picked up by some other org. A select few will truly reinvent themselves when they find their Lou Gerstner.

"..linchpin of democracy" is not an exaggeration. Like all other democratic institutions newspapers have their flaws but one has only to compare the anglo/western tradition of
privately controlled journalism to its opposite; Pravda, The People's Daily.

I, for one, will greatly miss newspapers and I think our society will suffer for their absence.
The most likely outcome is that we will continue to pay for newspapers but they will be online.
I just hope they can make that business model work. The Wall Street Journal apparently does just that. It does worry me that others have not followed that path. Maybe the PI will; I hope so.

Kieth

Gregory:
I think my point is that sooner or later good journalism get down to doing lots of hard work -- setting yourself aside, calling people up, keeping contacts and studying your beat -- rather than just repeating rumors that fit a political bent or pulling stuff out of your own head. Only a few bloggers seem to do real work. The rest are bloviation.