I GREW up with newspapers, love and cherish them, and earned a good living for nearly 35 years writing and editing for them. I can’t imagine my life without them and when my time comes I may ask to be wrapped and buried in them. The Sunday New York Times may actually get me from here to eternity.
But it is clear that newspapers (all journalism, really, including television) are passing through a profoundly difficult economic crisis caused by the Internet.
News that used to come in pressed-pulp packages costing between 25 cents and $1 per day is now delivered for free on the Web, and around the clock. If you’re sleepless, you can get up in the middle of the night and read stories that broke seconds ago at the same time as the overnight foreign-news editors in New York, Tokyo, or London.
And worse for the industry, the once prodigious full-page advertisements are shattering into innumerable inexpensive pieces that show up as website banner ads or commercial messages brought to you by Google. These ads contained a hidden but beneficent tax on people who shopped at department stores and supported armies of reporters.
Does this mean journalism is endangered? I don’t think so. In fact, I think a new period of prosperity may possibly lie ahead for the news organizations that can keep their integrity and core business intact through the tumult, panic, and bank-covenant defaults.
The reason is simple: The demand for journalism remains high, and perhaps has never soared higher. Many newspapers have never had more readers if they are allowed to count Internet readers as well as hard-copy buyers. We live complicated lives in a complicated world, and we navigate it with information. In this world, real journalism becomes essential.
If you believe in the power of the market, then market demand eventually will produce revenue, lots of it. The relationship is direct and proportionate. What is missing is the black box - otherwise known as the business model - that will transform public demand into media dollars.
My guess is that the black box basically will come down to a digital version of an old newspaper and magazine practice, the paid subscription. Advertising will be important, too, but far less so.
This transformation from “free on the Web’’ to “paying on the Web’’ is going to take some marketing geniuses to execute, but I figure if this country can produce marketers who persuaded a generation that water comes in bottles that cost $1.50 a piece, and more if you add a pretty color, then a way can be found to sell a high-quality news report online. Are you doubtful? I remember when television also was free.
The “news wants to be free’’ contingent doesn’t understand how markets work, and its members aren’t relying on news-organization salaries to put food on their tables or their children through college. “Free’’ is an ideological position, not a sustainable system for the production of expensive journalism.
This transformation may be one of the best things that has happened to journalism in a long time. For way too long, journalists have assumed the value of what they produce. But as good marketers know, value can not be assumed - it has to be identified, explained, reinforced, and related to the lives of people who are putting down their money.
When the creative talent gathers at some ad agency to begin the future campaign, I can think of no better place for them to begin their brainstorming on value than with the little book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, “The Elements of Journalism.’’
“The purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing,’’ say the authors. The book begins a list of journalism’s core values: Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth; its first responsibility is to citizens; its essence is the discipline of verification.
Now, there’s an ad campaign I’m looking forward to.
Lou Ureneck, a guest columnist, is a former editor-in-residence and fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation and now is chairman of the journalism department at Boston University. 
