Since the first of the year rarely a week passes without news that another newspaper is folding.  This is not an altogether surprising development.  The business model newspapers used for years (subscriptions and advertising) has steadily declined since the advent of the Internet.

The most desirable readers (read consumers) are the 18-49 set, and by and large these are Internet users.  When you can read web-based news content for free why subscribe?  Many don’t.  With the loss of readers followed a loss of advertizers.  Even the old standby — classified ads — suffer from the presence of craigslist.org. 

Still, the loss of a newspaper is lamentable.  One can experience a newspaper in a way not (yet) possible with online news.  Breakfast tables, coffee shops, and airport terminals are populated with people hiding behind newspapers.   While reading about the world readers can create their own world behind their papers.  It’s hard to do that with a Blackberry or iPhone.

One of the greatest pleasures is sitting down with a crossword puzzle and challenging oneself to complete it in ink.  No online game can duplicate the satisfaction of educating yourself in so fun a fashion.

Furthermore, whose baby books or scrapbooks or yearbooks or Bibles don’t have a few newspaper articles tucked into them.  It used to be an indication that someone had arrived when something they did merited the attention of the newspaper.  These days every 12-year-old has a MySpace page.  What will they have to look back on in their retirements if there are no newspapers to clip and save?

Unfortunately, it’s not much better in the other news media either.  Network news has shuttered news bureaus in the name of corporate profitability.  More and more cable news networks are about ideological commentary than investigative journalism.  Traditional wire services like United Press International are ghosts of what they used to be. 

What’s needed is a new business model.  Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) has proposed allowing newspapers to operate as non-profit entities, but if its aim is to keep newspapers in print its of limited merit because it doesn’t address the declining readership.  Even non-profit newspapers need readers.

Here’s a humble suggestion:

The traditional relationship between newspapers and wire services should be reversed.  Rather than pay wire services for national, international or industry content that newspapers retain the rights to publish locally, wire services should pay newspapers for the rights to distribute their content to online outlets.  This frees wire services of the need to employ their own reporters and essentially turns every newsroom in the country into a news bureau.  It provides newspapers a revenue stream that doesn’t depend on subscriptions or advertisers. 

The technology exists today to produce written and video content inexpensively and almost immediately, and websites can be maintained much more affordably than composing, printing and distributing newspapers.

For their part local newspapers should cease publication on everything but a weekly basis and go online.  They should acknowledge that readers long ago turned to television (and to a lesser extent radio) for their national, international and industry news.  They should limit their content to local news only. 

A Sunday-only edition would allow them to cover the week just ended, anticipate important newsworthy events of the week ahead, publish the legal notices they still have a statutory obligation to publish, and distribute the retail fliers they currently include in these editions.

And coffeehouses everywhere can still give readers a place to enjoy a drink and complete the crossword puzzle in ink at a leisurely pace.