The American Society of Newspaper Editors canceled its April convention, explaining that “the challenges editors face at their newspapers demand their full attention.”

It seems likely that the event would have proven gloomy. One imagines wooden carts creaking down hotel hallways while hooded figures call “Bring out your dead,” like a scene from the 14th century. But the plague spared 60 to 70 percent of Europe’s population; newspapers would be grateful for that survival rate.

As does much of history, the plague looks different when taken in perspective, which is another way of saying “as long as you weren’t stuck in the middle of it.” It changed the terms of trade between labor and land, broke up old social structures, and enhanced human mobility both geographically and socially, helping to clear the ground for the great leaps of subsequent centuries.

So conservatives, frustrated by the dirigiste liberal bias of the mainstream media, should approach print journalism’s disintegration in the spirit of Rahm Emanuel — “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — focusing on how to fashion a vibrant, open, and diverse news business out of the wreckage of the old newspaper business.

More than 1,400 dailies are printed in the U.S., but it is useful to recognize that, to a large extent, this is a single large enterprise with 1,400 local franchises — McNews. Printing and distributing a newspaper requires heavy initial capital investment but has low marginal costs. This creates high returns to scale, a recipe for market power, but the product is heavy and must be distributed by truck, which normally limits that market power to a metropolitan area. Most localities have one paper, and only the very largest have more than two.

The newsgathering end of the business is also subject to economies of scale and market power: Individual papers pooled resources to create the wire services, notably the Associated Press. In theory, and often in fact, this model allows a single reporter to cover a government agency or a major news event for the entire universe of papers. The AP is a cooperative owned by the daily newspapers, but its subscribers include TV stations, radio stations, and Internet news organizations. Its internal finances, and the fees paid by individual papers, are a mystery, since the public’s right to know stops at the AP’s door.

McNews is the product of this consolidation of non-local news. Having to compete only with television, each newspaper had a pretty solid grip on its readers’ access to the newsgathering apparatus. It had an even stronger grip on the reverse: the ability of newsmakers to reach the general public. Individual papers apply their own selection processes to the swirling stream of raw material; part of the value of this model is that each newspaper is not just an aggregator of news but also a filter, telling its readers: “We have scanned the universe, and here is what you need to know today to be informed.” If this job is done well, it pushes other sources of information to the margins.

But that market power was also the industry’s undoing. It is a truth universally acknowledged that any organization that escapes the discipline of the market — university, foundation, government agency, industrial enterprise — gets captured, inch by inch, by its staffers, and its market power is then turned to their benefit, which may take the form of money, ease, ideological satisfaction, or all three.

So it was with McNews. Pay went up, and parroting some alpha source such as the New York Times greatly reduced the demands and stress of the job. For many, journalism was not just a job but a chance to make a difference — meaning, in most cases, a chance to promote the vague ideology of state power exercised in the interests of the victim du jour. For an explanation of why this mindset came to dominate the once-honorable blue-collar trade of newspapering, you might ask a cultural anthropologist — but the same ideology dominates universities, foundations, and government, so the answer would probably be denial.

Such comfortable and profitable arrangements are not destined to endure. The Internet is demolishing this structure.

Contrary to popular impressions, newspaper circulation has held up pretty well in absolute terms, though it has not kept up with population growth. It was 63.3 million in 1984 and 51 million in 2007, but that number really reflects the near extinction of afternoon newspapers. Morning papers’ circulation actually increased from 35.7 million in 1984 to a peak of 46.8 million in 2001, and was at 44.5 million in 2007.

But the economic basis of this enterprise is collecting eyeballs to rent to advertisers. In 2005, 54 million daily readers paid $11 billion out of pocket for their newspapers in the form of subscriptions and single-copy sales. Most of the industry’s revenue, $44.7 billion, came from print advertising: $17.3 billion in classified, $22.2 billion in retail, and $7.9 billion from national accounts. Online ads produced $2 billion.

The Internet is taking a big bite out of those billions. Classified ads in particular are spectacularly inefficient: printing thousands of copies and driving them around in trucks, in the hope of reaching the relatively few readers who might be interested. And given that classifieds are themselves useful information, they can be published on the Internet independent of news reporting. As classifieds were hugely profitable — at one time providing 30 percent of all newspaper revenue — their decline has been catastrophic for many papers.

Other types of advertising are also vulnerable. A six-by-ten-inch ad in the Washington Post costs $11.55 per thousand subscribers — sensible for old-fashioned mass marketing, but not for businesses wanting to reach only a narrow segment of the Post’s circulation (623,000). And the Post reaches only 25 percent of households in its area.

How will this end? About 1,200 of the nation’s 1,400-plus dailies have circulations lower than 50,000, and they think they know: They are giving up their role as link to the outside world, opting out of the cooperative news services, and using their brand names and first-mover advantages to become community-based entities, setting up regional cooperatives where appropriate. They may go paperless or may not — after excessive debt is purged by bankruptcy, printing may still make sense. On the other hand, an item on the agenda of that canceled editors’ convention was to consider removing the word “paper” from the organization’s title.

The big-city dailies face knottier problems. Most of them ought to adopt the localized model of the smaller newspapers, but they are ambivalent, and some are cutting back local coverage rather than augmenting it. If they try to maintain the structure established when they had real market power, they probably will die.

The interesting question is: What will happen to the news itself, the beef on McNews’s menu? To say that you don’t need newspapers because you get your news from the Internet is like saying that you don’t need to burn coal because you rely on electricity. The content used by advertisers to hook viewers on the Internet is supplied mostly by newspapers and the wire services they finance. If that newsgathering structure cannot derive financial support from the local monopolies, it too will decline. So how will the Internet’s voracious appetite for news be sated?

Logically, one would anticipate the rise of competing newsgathering services of national or global reach, distributed online and directly accessible to readers. Some organizations, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, already are thinking along these lines. Surely in this lineup there will be room for services congenial to those of a conservative bent. It has been said of Fox News that “Rupert Murdoch discovered a niche market — half the country.” There’s a profit in that.

There is also a problem. Newspapers’ business model depended not only on the ability of the news organizations to monetize their content by attaching advertising to it, but also on the inability of others to do so. When they launched their online businesses, they (with the notable exception of the Wall Street Journal) embarked on a course of business suicide, drinking the “information wants to be free” Kool-Aid and in the process empowering every blogger and aggregator to mediate between the news source and the reader, raking off a cut of revenue along the way.

They may not have had much choice: Without the local monopoly, there is no way to charge for web access to national or international news, because readers can go elsewhere to get exactly the same content from the same wire service. But in allowing access by everyone to everything, the news organizations invited a tragedy of the commons, converting the news into a giant fishery into which anyone can dip a line to hook some advertising dollars.

Neither locally oriented papers nor national news services can run without money. They must find a way to monetize their products, whether by subscriptions, per-story micropayments, advertising, or all three. And that means control of access and protection against free-riding.

Conservatives have an opportunity to form an odd-couple alliance with the New York Times and other journalistic doyens who are rumbling about how information really wants to be paid for. Either we will have news-collection systems based on property rights and enterprise, or we will become dependent on foundations and government subsidies for our news, a system that would maintain the biases of McNews in super-virulent form, protected from market pressure. The crisis in journalism presents an opportunity conservatives should not miss.