Newspaper's closing looks like domino falling

A venerable newspaper has bitten the dust. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition today after 150 years of publication. The fear is that this is just the first of many dominoes to fall.

The news out of the newspaper business isn't good. Advertising revenue is declining. Fewer people are subscribing. Profits are down. Losses are up. Employment is down sharply, by half in some newsrooms. Americans are losing the reading habit and deceiving themselves into thinking they can keep up with the important news of the day by watching a few minutes of television's entertainment-oriented, shallow newscasts or by searching the Internet for the few topics they find of interest in their insular lives.

The decline of newspapers is a sad day for news junkies and former journalists like me, but it is also a sad day for American democracy. Newspapers are the essential nutrients of democracy. Without them, without the investigative capabilities of a well-funded newsroom, without the broad-ranging array of local, state, national and international news, without the community-building knowledge base of shared experience and concern, democracy is in jeopardy. Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." It is because newspapers provided the free expression and the knowledge that inoculated against ignorance that the Founding Fathers instituted the First Amendment.

A recent New York Times column addresses the importance of newspapers to the success of democracy and the prevention of corruption, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the danger to society that the financial decline of newspapers portends, Americans, except those who own newspaper stock or depend on newspapers for their paychecks, are blithely ignoring the collapse of fundamental reporting and watchdog journalism.

Readership of news is actually on the increase; it's just that fewer Americans are reading newspapers in print. Internet aggregators are posting links to newspapers' reporting and providing this information free to readers. The aggregators profit from ads on their Web sites, which owe their popularity to the news they provide, but the newspapers receive no added revenue from the eyeballs their efforts attract. If newspapers keep losing ad revenue to Internet aggregators, they soon won't be able to finance the reporting that is as essential to readers as it is to the aggregators.

A variety of solutions have been proposed to solve this dilemma, ranging from charging for access to newspaper Web sites to higher charges for printed newspapers to financing newspapers through philanthropic foundations. I don't know what the solution to this dilemma is, and I don't expect to return to the newspaper business where I spent most of my life, but I do fear for what will happen to society and to democracy if the Rocky Mountain News is just one of many falling dominoes.