This past spring, the Columbia Journalism Review convened a panel of top editors and a media investor to discuss the somewhat tiresome topic of the future of newspapers. The situation is undeniably bleak. One need merely consult Romenesko, the media-news aggregator, to witness the freefall in circulation, the unending editorial cutbacks, and the closure of foreign bureaus at so many major metropolitan papers. The panelists—Robert Kuttner, the founding co-editor of The American Prospect; Jim Brady, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com; Amanda Bennett, the executive editor for enterprise at Bloomberg News and the former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times; and Steven Rattner, a managing principal of Quadrangle Group LLC, a media investment firm—focused mainly on the need for a new business model, one that would address the rise of the Internet and its negative impact on subscription revenue and advertising, particularly classified. But halfway through the evening, Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school and the panel’s moderator, asked Rattner a surprising question: “What policy interventions would you take to keep institutions like The New York Times and The Washington Post alive if they can’t keep themselves alive in the market?” As the emerging suggestions for mitigating the problems of the publicly traded newspaper—private equity (the Minneapolis Star Tribune), billionaire patronage (Santa Barbara News-Press), and even nonprofit ownership (see Louis Hau’s December 2006 Forbes column on the problems of The St. Petersburg Times)—are proving to have their own unique challenges, the role of government in supporting the press is just beginning to enter the debate. Kuttner, whose March/April cover story in cjr inspired the panel, was somewhat optimistic about the future of the newspaper business. But Rattner, a former journalist, was far less hopeful in his answer to Lemann’s...

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