More on newspapers

I happened upon this essay, originally from The New Republic, this morning when I was reading the recap of last night's Kings game on The Sacramento Bee's Web site. The author, Princeton Professor Paul Starr, does a good job summarizing the current state of newspapers and analyzing their importance to the public. I thought it was interesting he referred to news as a "public good" here:

Public goods are notoriously underproduced in the marketplace, and news is a public good – and yet, since the mid-19th century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy.

Public goods usually are something you want the government to subsidize, since the market is not producing the optimal amount on its own. I expected Starr to follow with some proposal for the government to subsidize newspapers, which, thankfully, he didn't. Not every paper can be BBC or NPR, and the idea of the watchdog having a tie to the government makes me nervous.

Taking a step back, the fact that I even stumbled upon this story shows that reading news on the Web isn't all bad. Many have cited the "serendipity" that print newspapers allow--the stories that you wouldn't go out of your way to read, but are happy you found--and lamented that there is no such parallel online. But that's not necessarily true, as I found out this morning.