I think this New Republic essay on the decline of traditional newspapers and the subsequent peril of the Republic is wrong in most ways, but worth reading. Princeton’s Paul Starr argues that online media do not have the reporting infrastructure or editorial standards to perform the traditional “watchdog” function of the press.

This assumes, of course, that the traditional press is still performing that watchdog function. It’s not entirely clear to me that it is, and certainly not clear that it’s doing a better job of it than new-media ventures such as The Politico (which is more of a website with a newspaper attached than the other way around), or others with a variety of methodologies and philosophies.

Starr’s argument also assumes that the decline of print as such is terminal. That’s probably not the case. What is likely to fade to black is daily newspaper printing. For example, the Christian Science Monitor has gone to an online operation with a weekly print edition, and it seems likely that this model will be more common. A daily printing bill, along with delivery costs, is a big nut to cover. And the quality of what fills most daily newspapers — AP dispatches, quotidian reportage, utterly predictable commentary — isn’t going to compete well in a newly competitive media environment, and probably will prove insufficient to generate the revenue needed to pay for the expensive daily print model while satisfying shareholders.

Both the New York Times and (rather incredibly, in my view) the L.A. Times are said to generate about enough online revenue to pay for their editorial operations. But printing and delivering cost a bundle, and the daily print model probably ends up undermining content. They’ll probably be able to do better journalism after they stop the presses, or start running them once a week. There’s not much reason to think that an all-online or mostly online New York Times will be any less reliable (nor, alas, any more reliable) than the familiar grimy print version. If going to weekly printing means American journalism starts reading less like the AP and more like The Economist, that would be a good thing.