Does A Free Press Have A Future?

This 3/27/09 cartoon in The Denver Post.

Significantly, Denver's other daily newspaper (The Rocky Mountain News) went out of business this year. The Christian Science Monitor and Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped printing and went online only. The Detroit Free Press has daily papers at the news stand but only Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions (the days with the most ads) will be home delivered. The Washington Post & Newsweek contracted their resources to NBC, where they have become regulars on MSNBC's lineup of political news talk hours. The San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times are rumored to be near bankruptcy. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are already there.
President Obama blew off the spring dinner/roast held by the "Gridiron Club" of newspaper reporters and columnists (March 21st) and in a prime time news conference (March 24th) Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press got the first question, but he didn't call on a single big city daily member of the White House press corps.

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Are newspapers the dinosaurs of the digital age?
When Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) introduced a bill that would allow newspapers to operate like nonprofit organizations -- kind of like public broadcasting stations, CNN's Jack Cafferty asked "Should government be involved in saving newspapers?"
334 answers from "definitely" to "definitely not" poured in and are posted at his blog.

Conservative political commentator/writer S.E. Cupp, co-author of the book Why You're Wrong About the Right, is also a regular contributor to Politico.com's The Arena and a frequent quest on Fox News. Her writings have appeared at The Washington Post, The American Spectator, Human Events, Slate, Maxim, and Sports Illustrated.
Cupp opined the Death of Newspapers Isn't Death of Journalism.
When unable to follow the NCAA tournament, she checked scores throughout the night on her Blackberry... Unable to imagine being forced to wait until the next morning, when the newspaper came out, to get a recap of her team’s exploits the prior night.
She asserts newspapers have failed to adjust to the faster currents of this century’s technology tidal wave. Thanks to the cumbersome and time-consuming production of printing, they're chained to the past... And belong there.

Clay Shirky, in Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable writes:
"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead...
"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public  — has stopped being a problem...
"If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run... The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads...
"People committed to saving newspapers demanding to know 'If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?' To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke..."

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All these items come from blogs, the 21st century analog of personal publishing, and via the Internet where anything available has effectively been released to the public domain... A virtual marketplace where information is free to those with the time and ingenuity to find it.

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A Google Map of 2009 Newspaper Job Cuts.
USA Today profiles the latest changes at big papers.