Let the chaotic times roll.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: WORDS IMAGES - Digital and print journalism through the financial crisis

THESE ARE WORRISOME TIMES for journalists and the public alike. The economic crisis has hastened the demise of the newspaper before the potential of the all-digital newspaper could be realized. Television news long ago gave up the battle of informing the public by resorting mostly to non-news, spots, and weather. What value TV news broadcasters still bring the public usually are stories they see in newspapers and then regurgitate. The Internet, potentially the most valuable means of conveying information and news in the history of the planet, still is in its infancy, spewing out rumor, gossip, facts, opinion, ideas, and bulletins in chaotic fashion. It will take seasoned gatekeepers and organizers to make sense of it all, but who will pay them to do the job? That seems to be the most pressing problem at hand.

There has been no end of proposed solutions, some as old as the printing press, some brand new: digital newspaper subscription prices; pay-on-demand stories; advertising revenue; philanthropy; government subsidies. Young entrepreneurs are trying bits and pieces of all of this in an attempt to earn a living being a journalist in cyberspace. If the economy had stayed intact, there might have been time to figure it all out. Now, too many journalists are fighting just to pay their bills. There is no time to experiment. Those who own the media do not know what to do, so they do what all frightened employers do in a crisis: they fire their best people, destroying the product that had made them so much money in the past. Subscribers look at the dwindling pieces of paper on their driveways and on newsstands and wonder why they still should subscribe to a paper that is a mere shadow of what it used to be.

Magazines are in the same boat, as more and more readers desert them for their online counterparts. It also is much easier to search for a word, a person, an idea when reading an online magazine. Imagine being able to search the entire archive of The New Yorker in seconds? All of those yellowed clippings gathering dust in the file cabinet seem to have come from another world. When was the last time anyone clipped a newspaper or magazine? It is so much easier finding that article or cartoon on the Internet when you want it.

Former newspaper journalists write blog after blog, article after article, offering solutions to a problem they basically ignored when they worked on the newspapers. Their answers are heartfelt, but mired in the media of the...