Justice B. Hill

I wonder what will happen when the newspaper business is even less of an institution than it is these days. The public’s watchdog isn’t asleep; it’s on life supports.

I’m the last person to suggest the business was perfect even in its glory days; it had flaws and conflicts of interests and biases and carelessness and downright frauds. Yet the industry did more good for the public than bad. No institution has been more mindful of this democracy and its excesses than the newspaper business.

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” as founding father James Madison once put it, “is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

In the past decade, popular information has moved past the prologue; it is deep into the body of this farce, courtesy of a press too weak, too obsessed with style rather than substance to safeguard the public’s interest.

From its inability to forecast the economic downturn, to its inaccurate, incomplete accounts of the Iraq War to its myopia on social issues, the press is no more a reliable watchdog than a dachshund.

At unnerving times like these, Americans need pit bulls manning the press corps. They can’t task that duty to a handful of elite newspapers like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times; they need the press from big to small newspapers to take on the obligations that Madison called for.

But how does that duty return to the hands of a press that has lost its appetite for serving the public?

Newspapers have to become relevant again. They stopped being relevant from the time they banked their future on the Internet. They gave away a product that people would pay for, and they did so in hopes dollars might rain like confetti from the heavens.

It’s a failed business model, and daily newspapers should stop relying on it. They should not abandon their websites altogether. Instead, they should use the web to complement their daily product. What appears in the print version of the daily newspaper should not be what readers find on its website.

And above all else, the newspaper should return to its roots: covering its community like the morning dew.

For nowhere else can readers find unvarnished stories about city council, the school board and the courts; nowhere else can readers find reviews of local plays, concerts and restaurants.

Need a report on your local high school teams or the local figure skating phenom, you shouldn’t find that content on the newspaper’s website. And you certainly won’t find it in the national media.

The future of newspapers, as simple as it seems, is in ensuring their content has a price tag. If editors and publishers continue to give their content away, can they ever expect people to pay for it, no matter how important that content might be?

Let me answer that question: The answer is “no.”