For weeks this summer, the bustling newsstand at the corner outside my office has been displaying the current issue of the New York Review of Books featuring a piece by the great, now retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker, with a headline that reflects a widespread and downbeat question these days: “Goodbye to Newspapers?” Baker’s columns were always infused with subtle irony and humor that made them a pleasure to read. But this piece is grim.

“The American press has the blues,” he writes, “Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered. Too many good newspapers are in ruins. . . . Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the internet and its owners seem stricken by the failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age . . . (there is) a melancholy sense that the press is yesteryear’s thing, a horse drawn buggy on an eight-lane interstate.”

But looking at the newsstand I was struck by the fact that surrounding the New York Review of Book was a plethora of newspapers, dailies, local and national, a selection of weeklies, plus papers in Greek, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Chinese directed at New Yorkers. At the adjoining subway entrance were stacks of free newspapers, including old standbys like the Village Voice and newcomers like AM New York. Instead of a funeral procession, I seemed to be perusing a hyperkinetic scrum.

Of course, news delivered on paper is in trouble. The declines in advertising and circulation revenues are serious. The sale of Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch has symbolic and business consequences and the loss of 1½ inches from the New York Times to save money on newsprint diminishes the size if not the stature of this pillar of journalism. All these are reflections of profound changes under way and not, it is widely assumed, for the better when it comes to the way we get news. The dismal statistics are combined with news peoples’ natural tendency—an essential component in the business—to favor bad news over good and to be skeptical of anyone at the helm. Nearly everyone in journalism reads Romenesko, the daily billboard of news about the news and in its comprehensive account of cuts and losses; the impression is unavoidable of inexorable decline.

But that story line, I believe, is only part of the story. Everything you’ve read about the travails of the newspaper business is true. Yet as we head towards Labor Day, a traditional time of renewal in news and business cycles, it is worth noting what else is happening to the art and science of gathering and delivering news that represents a future that is probably unavoidable and not necessarily bad. The fundamental reality is that newsprint is being supplanted and supplemented by digital technologies. This is no longer new. In a critique of how the Bancrofts managed their ownership of Dow Jones, Steve Coll, a former managing editor of the Washington Post, wrote in the New Yorker:

“The Bancrofts failed because they proved incompetent in the sphere that belonged to them as owners. This involved the adaptation of their inherited newspaper business model to support deep and independent reporting in the digital age. The urgency of this mission has been clear since at least the mid-nineties. As newspaper circulation fell, computing and telecommunications merged, and the Internet arrived with all the subtlety of a supernova.” In other words, Dow Jones either couldn’t or didn’t make itself strong enough to withstand the importuning of Murdoch. Meanwhile, writes Coll, “Michael Bloomberg erected a skyscraper of a company on Dow Jones’s front lawn. He did this by pioneering the use of new technologies to profitably speed up and deliver business information.”

The transformations of the past decade are comparable to any number of other technological changes over the past century—the spread of telephones and photography, the evolution of film from silent to talking, the rise of radio and then television. Each of these upheavals led to new business models that reflected the way information was delivered, taking advantage of efficiency to make money and supplying content that was appealing. For a very long time, the prime end product was a printed page, and then various kinds of audio-video receivers. Today, the printed page has been decisively challenged by the screen and the range of receivers has expanded to all sorts of wireless gadgetry.

The consequences of the irreversible changes under way come in, at least, two categories: content and distribution.

Content: There is always a tug-of-war in the presentation of news between what is popular and what is necessary. What made great “print” journalists was their ingenuity and writing skill for that medium. The list of outstanding writers of the past fifty years is long (with Russell Baker near the top). I know enough of today’s young journalists and filmmakers to know that the pool of talent is considerable and the skills they need to succeed remain as they always were: energy, imagination, technique, plus the support of editorial mentors. The great innovations of the modern age in print were narrative momentum and the instinct to challenge orthodoxy. (See Platform: “David Halberstam and Today’s Reporters,” June 5, 2007).

Today’s trick is to know how to attract readers and viewers in all the places they now turn for information with the same kind of breadth and enterprise that characterized reporting in the past. The emerging formats obviously pose different challenges, but that is nothing new either. I remember, for instance, the 1960s when newspapers in response to television news started becoming more like magazines, and magazines like Esquire and Harper’s adopted long-form narrative like books, and books then became more topical (Theodore White’s “Making of the President” series and so on). Competition for content good enough to go on the proverbial front page is eternal. What changes is the way it is distributed.

Distribution: In July, the New York Times Web site had 14,149,000 unique visitors who stayed for an average of 27 minutes and 21 seconds, about the time, I would guess, they spend with the paper most days. Editor and Publisher had a list of thirty newspapers with sites that attracted more than a million visitors. Many of those are presumably overlap readers with the printed papers, but the crowds attracted to these venues plainly want the stuff they are getting. The interaction between traditional newsrooms and what goes onto the Web is perhaps the most important issue in the news business today. The newspapers that I usually read and whose Web sites I also frequent—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal—are becoming increasingly proficient in using video, chat rooms, blogs, and pod casts to make their sites more interesting in the ways that today’s consumers seem to want.

The frictions in these enterprises over who does what and how they are billed by the corporate structures over them are still an issue (for example, the newsroom pays for the bureau in Baghdad, which the Web site uses at no cost, able therefore to show rising revenue from advertising, while the foreign desk is under pressure to reduce expenses because revenue at the paper is down). “Creative tension” was Ben Bradlee’s signature label for how newsrooms should operate, keeping everyone on their toes in the contest for maintaining quality and getting into the paper. Today’s tension is over the presentation skills that the Web requires and the deployment of resources. The drop in circulation and print revenues is not yet balanced by the benefits of attracting millions to “newspaper” sites. Management’s tendency to reduce overhead on the print side would be less worrisome if its investment in the burgeoning Web was offsetting, but too often it isn’t. The instinct to cut the print resources in response to the changing economics is a form of slow-motion immolation.

A report issued the other day by Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy asserted, according to a summary I read, that audiences are shifting to “websites that post news provided by a third source,” such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. Well, those sites are only as good as the material they lift from the newspapers, magazines, and news agencies that actually gather the news. One clearly essential step is for newspapers that collect information with their own reporters to start charging the new-fangled and flush aggregators at Google and elsewhere for using that material at a market rate. When revenue from one source—say classifieds—goes down, managers need to find new sources. The best of news gathering is a premium product and the people who benefit from it should be picking up a substantial part of the tab. How much would you pay for your daily printed copy of the New York Times (it is now $1.25, about a third of a medium latte at Starbucks)? The daily Washington Post still only costs $0.35.

There are many models for how good journalism can be financially supported: subscriptions, circulation, and advertising are the current methods. But there are other possibilities: a mix of public financing and underwriting as public radio now does or a single but increased subscription price covering both print and the Web. It is worth recalling also that for decades sponsor-supported television news was available free from the networks, which were, in their day, as rich as some of the search-engine disseminators are now. There has to be a solution to this fundamental problem. Advertisers need to reach consumers one way or another, and news product has always delivered the eyeballs and probably always will.

So as we round into September 2007, what you have is a newsstand still full of lively newspapers and a Web attracting ever-larger audiences to the content they provide and the new means they are devising for delivering it with as much verve as technology and talent permit. This is not an easy time for newspapers, the people who work in them, and the people who own them, but they are a long way from their demise, unless of course, they give up.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos’ columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.