One of the most vexed contemporary commercial controversies is the future of the newspaper. It is a technological, and in the United States, a socio-cultural question. It is clear enough that the traditional newspaper—based on the felling of trees and their conversion to newsprint, and the delivery of said newsprint to urban plants where immense high-speed presses create the physical commodity for vast distribution networks that deliver it throughout metropolitan areas and even whole countries—is passing. This mode of newspapering had an astonishing durability, surviving premature death notices with the arrival of the radio, television, and each subsequent phase of electronic media. Newspapers still survive, though unstably, on the old formula and still try to use the internet as a teaser to draw readers to their printed product, grinding out a little longer under the Sisyphean burden of immense presses and hideously expensive distribution networks. This heroic incumbency is gasping in its last days, at least in larger centers.

It may be that small newspapers in small centers will not be practical targets for direct internet assault, but their only assets, so dispersed from metropolitan sensibilities as to enable them to fly beneath the radar up to now, are local advertising, local correspondents, and local municipal and sporting events. If an effort to destroy the economics of the local newspaper were backed by modest local publicity and some discounting for the leading local advertisers, and provided that internet penetration was about 65 percent or better within the circulation