Fading print: how we will survive without newspapers.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

To SAVE WHAT'S left of the newspaper industry, serial entrepreneur Steve Brill has launched a new startup, Journalism Online, which will help news organizations charge for their digital content. So far he has convinced at least 506 people in America that this is a terrific idea. They're all publishers who have agreed to participate in the venture, but you have to start somewhere, right?

In related news, the Associated Press says it's on the verge of creating articles that can perform investigative journalism even after they've been filed--a "tracking beacon" embedded in these stories will alert the A.P. when websites quote them without authorization. Meanwhile, Dan Rather thinks we should add "editor in chief" to the growing list of Barack Obama's duties. "I want the president to convene a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon commission to assess the state of the news as an institution and an industry and to make recommendations for improving and stabilizing both," the former CBS anchorman said in an August Washington Post op-ed. "This is a crisis that, with no exaggeration, threatens our democratic republic at its core"

Do you want to know the really bad news?

Despite all the layoffs, buy-outs, and shutdowns that have afflicted the newspaper industry in the last year, there are still 46,700 newsroom employees working at the nation's 1,411 dailies, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 2009 census. That means we've still got years of alarmist op-ed pieces, Hail Mary revenue schemes, and Hail Congress calls for subsidies and rule changes before every last school board meeting in America goes unmonitored and we descend into chaos, corruption, and life without paid classified ads.

Newspapers, their passionate boosters maintain, are a kind of civic Pilates, the institution that keeps the core of our democratic republic as tight and toned as Megan Fox's midsection. TV news can show us war zones, and radio news may offer us aerial assessments of traffic jams, but newspaper news does the real heavy lifting of journalism. It sorts fact from rumor. It shines light on government murk and corporate malfeasance and helps our citizenry make informed and rational decisions. Without healthy newspapers, we're just Myanmar with better department stores and less stylish military uniforms.

That's the rallying cry of the newspaper industry's saviors, anyway. As Jack Sharer memorably put it in Slate, this narrative reduces newspapers to a "compulsory...