Are newspapers really dying ...

... or is it murder?

I don't read Time magazine anymore, but a friend sent me an article that coincided with the folding of the Rocky Mountain News, listing 10 other major papers that were in danger of folding before the end of the year.

It didn't surprise me that there were papers in trouble, but I was shocked by at least a few of the ones on the list. The Boston Globe, for instance. The Globe is one of the finest papers in the country, but it's reportedly losing $1 million a month.

The Miami Herald, for another, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Both are the dominant papers in their market and have been for a long time. When I see papers like that in trouble, I really find myself wondering if journalism has a future.

It doesn't help that most papers now aren't owned or run by news people. Big companies looking for big profits scarfed up a lot of papers in good times, when profit margins were running 25-30 percent.

Now that profits are down, and in some places gone completely, there's no sense of mission to keep them going. A newspaper losing money is just like a department store losing money to these people -- something to be sold or closed.

The San Francisco Chronicle, another disappearing newspaper, was the flagship of the Hearst empire for the better part of a century. I would have loved to have worked there; it was one of my dream destinations.

Now of course some will say that print media itself is obsolete, that with the Internet we really don't have to kill all these trees. Yes, I can read the news on my BlackBerry. It isn't the same, though, and they'll never be able to monetize the Internet as effectively as they did when they sold copies of papers. There are just too many people who believe with all their hearts that content on the 'net should be free.

So they'll survive in Web editions with much less revenue, which means fewer reporters and less investigative work. Fewer malefactors and miscreants will be exposed, and those who work in the shadows will have a much easier time of it.

I've said for several years that newspapers should not be operated as for-profit businesses anyway. Their constitutional protection via the First Amendment makes them far too important. Maybe it's time we got serious about finding a way to save newspapers before they're all gone.