Philip Meyer, a pioneer of computer-assisted reporting in the U.S. and a sage commentator on the economics of the news business, is back with another essay, this time in Columbia Journalism Review.

In some ways, it's a re-working of an essay he wrote for American Journalism Review about nine years ago on the need for publishers to accept lower profits. Anway, read them both, then you can decide. :)

An excerpt from the current one:

You have probably noticed by now that journalism is being phased out. Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment. The pure news audience is drifting away as old readers die and are replaced by young people hooked on popular culture and amusement. We used to think the young would pick up the habit and be more like us as they got older. They didn't. Newspaper habits are pretty much set by the time a person is old enough to be included in readership surveys.

Newspaper old-timers like me tend to blame the business side. All that is required to restore journalism to its golden age, we are tempted to say, is for the greedy investors and their bean counters to retire from the scene and allow themselves to be replaced by people more like the philosopher-king publishers of yore. Great journalism would draw great audiences again.

But those guys aren't coming back. Their business model has been irreversibly undermined by new technology. The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility.

The old model was beautifully simple. A newspaper publisher in a monopoly market in the twentieth century was like those counts of Savoy who built a castle on the rock of Chillon between the foot of a mountain and the edge of Lake Geneva. Travelers could swim the lake or climb the mountain, or they could pay a toll to the occupants of the castle. That arrangement kept the Savoys and their heirs rich and comfortable for three centuries.

Today, the castle is a museum. Technology has created other ways to cross the lake and the mountain. And so it is with publishers. They still own the channel along which information is passed between local retailers and their customers, but it's no longer exclusive. The competition did not start with the Internet. It became a concern right after World War II with the rollout of TV and the growth of FM radio, plus the development of cheap, high-quality printing to make direct-mail advertising and niche publications feasible.

As monopolists or near-monopolists, the publishers of the last century enjoyed abnormally high profit margins: 20 percent to 40 percent. Newspaper companies might believe that those abnormal margins are their birthright, but they're not. High-quality journalism is still economically feasible, but it will never again be as profitable. The real problem is adjusting to profit levels that are normal for competitive markets.

Here's the revolutionary part:

We need to keep genuine journalism alive long enough for the successful media entrepreneurs of the future to find a way to capture and sell the influence that traditional media are abandoning through their cost-cutting strategies. Those who understand the influence model and apply it to the new, more specialized marketplaces could start to look very much like journalism's philosopher-kings of the twentieth century.