That’s $300,000 a month in revenue, or $3.6 million a year, with zero printing or circulation costs. Moreover, that total doesn’t include whatever money online advertising might generate. Advertisers—considering a paid circulation base rather than meaningless Web hits—might be willing to once again pay a meaningful rate.

Round it up to $4 million in total revenue, then knock off a half million in operating and promotional costs. At $100,000 a position for editors and reporters, that’s a metro desk of some thirty-five paid souls, enough to provide significant coverage of a city and its suburbs. If the reporters are on $50,000 contracts and benefits are not initially included, it’s a newsroom of seventy—larger than the Sun’s metro staff in the nineties.

And if that online-only, paid-subscription daily were a locally-run nonprofit, with every increase in subscriptions going to fund additional coverage, well, what more does professional journalism require to survive at the state and local level?

Third scenario: Except for one in which professional journalism doesn’t endure in any form, this is the worst of all worlds. The Times and The Post survive because their coverage is unique and essential. But the regional dailies, too eviscerated to offer a credible local product, cannot entice enough online subscriptions to make do. They wither and die. And further, new online news ventures are stillborn because both national papers become exactly that—national.

Imagine major American cities without daily newspapers, and further imagine the Times or The Post employing just enough local journalists in regional markets to produce zoned editions—The New York Times with, say, a ten-person St. Louis bureau, giving readers two or three pages of metro, sports, and local business coverage. Or a Washington Post edition for the Baltimore region, using a dozen ex-Sun staffers to create a thin but viable product, where once a comprehensive metro daily once stood.

The joke then would be on the Justice Department lawyers as well. The longer it takes for the newspaper industry to get its act together, the more likely it is that regional dailies will be too weak and hollow to step through the online-subscription portal. Even localized Internet startups—the fledgling, digitized versions of professional newsrooms—will find themselves competing with, or bought out by, national monoliths. More monopoly, not less, for as long as we continue to fret the antitrust issues.

But all of this is, of course, academic. Because at this moment, Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth have yet to turn that last card. Until they find the will and the courage to do so, no scenario other than the slow strangulation of paid, professional journalism applies. Meanwhile, we dare to dream of a viable, online future for American newsrooms.