A recent Democracy Now! segment featured an excellent discussion of the fall of daily newspapers. The first half of the discussion was about new business models that don't rely on advertisements, perhaps sponsered by grants or public funds. There weren't many details, but I found the discussion interesting. It would probably be good if media conglomerates start selling off their holdings, and perhaps those fired journalists and editors will start their own, less compromised projects.

Near the end came a discussion about the difference between newspapers and the internet, and why the internet cannot replace print. "The average reader of the paper copy of the New York Times spends forty-five minutes reading the paper. The average viewer of the New York Times website spends about seven minutes." That was Chris Hedges, senior fellow at the Nation Institute and a former correspondent for the New York Times.

And thenLinda Jue, director of New Voices in Independent Journalism: "... what I’m slowly coming around to is understanding that, yes, the internet does not—is not a good medium for delivering long-form, in-depth reporting. And I don’t think that we should try to, you know, plug a square peg into a round hole that way. But I think that, realistically, we have to look at ways to generate attention, to use the internet to drive attention to longer-form reporting that can be found elsewhere, including print."

The whole discussion took the issues a little further than I've seen it anywhere else, and I've been looking at the issue pretty closely for months now.