Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Before we come to The Economist's cover story this week, let's get some perspective on why such an influential publication might even consider writing an obituary for its own business. And we'll start with something The Economist didn't even discuss in its leader or its " Special Report": growing disillusion with the old disinformation order. On 15 August, blogger Glenn Reynolds asked: Can a free press survive if the public concludes that it's in the business of publishing politically motivated propaganda on behalf of civilization's enemies? In "Don't Trust If They Won't Verify", Reynolds concluded:

"Perhaps newspapers will be less willing to use photos and stories from AP and Reuters when those stories are likely to be lies, and I strongly suspect that readers will be less likely to trust newspapers when they run stories that are exploded as propaganda. It's not too late for the press to save itself yet. But it's getting close."

This debate is not new, of course. In November 2004, the English blogger Tim Worstall heralded the end of the media's fake objectivity and tolled the bell heftily for newspapers in a piece titled "More Bias, Please":

"I think we would all agree that dead tree printing of newspapers is on its way out. It might take a decade or five for the public to finally give up the ghost but despite Robert Maxwell's comment (he said that computers would never replace newspapers because you couldn't read them on the toilet), give it up it will."

Worstall is witty, and so is Damian Reece, who pointed out the following rather obvious fact yesterday: "The Economist, a newspaper first published in 1843 and still going strong, asks the question in its current edition 'Who Killed The Newspaper?' " Heh. Heh. Reece writes for the profitable Daily Telegraph and, after taking a few delicious swipes at the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent, he notes in Business comment: "I happen to agree with The Economist's prognosis for the future, which includes an elite group of serious newspapers. I'll let you decide which titles you think will be around to form part of that group." For what it's worth, Rainy Day has no doubts that The Economist will survive the transition. Still, the weekly soberly observes:

"Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come."

The Economist recommends that newspapers must take "a more innovative, more businesslike approach — or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece." Actually, in our opinion, one of the first things they should consider doing is maximizing their "museum piece" destiny by digitizing their archives. When they are no longer in the news business, newspapers will be profitable as a result of the fees generated from the next wave of information workers who'll need to access everything from the Clare Champion's account of Eamon De Valera's election in 1918 to reports of life in Texas when it was an independent republic and Sam Houston was its president. All that, and more, can be found in The Galveston County Daily News (since 1842).

As a child of the 20th century, I shall miss newspapers. I came of age with them and came to value their role in democracy's armoury. But the newspaper industry is yesterday's news. Of course Mick Jagger saw all this coming in 1967 when he sang: "Living a life of constant change / Every day means the turn of a page / Yesterdays papers are such bad news." The song was Yesterday's Paper and the album was Between The Buttons. Always knew Mick Jagger was a visionary.

This just in: Today's New York Times gets in on the act with What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse. Money graf: "The dismantling of Knight Ridder is a study of the hurdles facing publicly traded newspaper companies in a time of seismic change in the industry. The migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet, as well as rising costs and falling revenue, are threatening the financial well-being — even the very existence — of some of the industry’s most storied brand names." Read all about it!