Quinn,

I also love newspapers and read several daily, although that might make me a generational anomaly. But I have the same complaints as you do about their volumes of wasted newsprint (although I tend to hang on to the travel section and wherever they happen to be hiding the crossword). Clearly, they're doomed in their present form, and good riddance.

There are two crucial things, however, that I think can't be replaced by the aggregated blogosphere. This is really just off the top of my head, so I'd love help thinking it through. And just to be clear, this is not to say these things can't be replaced by online journalism -- the dead-tree papers are only going to be useful until every house has high-speed internet access and every American has web fluency -- according to our president-elect, something that we can expect sooner rather than later.

The first thing is large-scale archival research like the Guantanamo Docket that I linked to in the post. This is pretty tedious and thankless work that no pageview-addicted blogger or even team of bloggers would find it worth their while to engage in. But the public deserves access to this kind of information. That, so far as I can see, takes salaried researchers at journalistic institutions that are going to make their profit elsewhere.

The second thing is worldwide investigative reporting, deployable instantly. I agree that I'd take the account of the passionate devotee to any given cause over that of your average barely-interested reporter. One thing that the blogosphere should be teaching newspapers is that readers want specialized information and thus expert-level journalists. However, someone has to pay those people who are devoting themselves 24/7 for 20 years to the environment or what-have-you. Frequently those experts are currently paid by universities. Of course many academics do blog, but as long as they're academics first and bloggers second (or third, or fourth), the reader can't be guaranteed that they'll be available as a reliably continuous source of information at the drop of a hat. I'll take myself as an example. My area of expertise is Islam in Europe and N. America. I don't have a blog about this, but let's say I did. Now let's say an Islamicist terrorist attack happens in Paris, but I'm drowning in grading, or translating, or whatever my day job happens to be. I might be better equipped to go report on the situation than Joe-the-Paris-bureau-reporter, but I can't guarantee I'll be able to do so tomorrow unless that reporting is my job.

To my mind, blogging can give us the first version of history faster than newspapers -- case in point, the twittering from Mumbai during the recent attack. And blogging can give us opinion more cost-efficiently than newspapers -- as they say, everyone's got one. But it's the in-between -- the educated but also immediately available investigative reporting, especially with a global reach -- that I have a hard time imagining anything but institutional journalism providing. Now the key will be for journalistic institutions to realize the things they are uniquely capable of, and to develop those capacities. (i.e., steal some of the brain trust from academia and teach them how to write.) And then, of course, to have a profit model to support that. I wonder, though, if newspapers started actually providing this, and only this, whether people wouldn't be more willing to pay for it.

Sorry for the epic-length comment! But I'm fascinated by this situation and still haven't hammered out what I think about it.