Of course, India is a long way from that dire eventuality. Despite being temporarily hobbled by the current economic climate, newsprint costs, etc, our print media is one of the few bright spots (along with China and Japan) in the World Association of Newspapers’ (WAN) otherwise wan reports. There are more readers, more journalists and more media outlets than ever. Close to 370 million literate Indians not currently served by any publication are all for the taking. Rising literacy and the “aspirational” associations of newspaper consumption, and pretty dismal levels of Internet use ensure that both regional and English publications can safely expect to be around for a while. But that doesn’t insulate us from the same shocks, delayed as they might be. If anything, it gives Indian media a precious window, for a phase of low-risk experiment.

In much of the world, newspapers have been gently waning in economic health and cultural centrality for years, but now they’re practically convulsing. In the US this year, newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3 per cent, losing 64.5 billion dollars in market value. The digital onslaught has been exacerbated several times by the recession. Adspends have shrunk, and those there are naturally migrate towards the Web where it is possible to contextualise them to users (giving them a laserlike precision that newspaper ads lack). Whether you’re reading this on paper or screen, you might be one of the thinning tribe of readers staving off the newspaper industry’s slo-mo, but spectacular, slide into oblivion. This particular section of the newspaper — the edit and op-ed pages which curate commentary — has an even harder time proving its utility against a whole avalanche of user-generated and semi-professional content on the Web.

These are trying times for almost every sector, but few contend that the newspaper business will retrieve lost ground. Some blamed the flabby, corrupt press corps and complacent corporate practices. Others rejected the self-flagellation — “the crops did not fail because we offended the gods” and there’s no point blaming journalists, said British media commentator Adrian Monck. Rather, like the professional porn industry or the music industry, travel agencies or encyclopaedia publishers, the newspaper industry is being cruelly outmoded by technology, one that renders the business of journalism hard to sustain. Newspapers, as a format, depend on cumbersome physical infrastructure, transport, presses, newsprint — in contrast, online publishing is virtually effortless. In many parts of the world, classifieds have moved online, delivering another mortal blow to the business. Plus, in the long term, if newsgathering can be crowdsourced from amateurs and sorted by them on user-driven sites like Digg or Reddit, who needs professional journalists? As new media ideologue and NYU professor Jay Rosen put it, can we envision “journalism without the media”?

To be fair, newspapers have mostly anticipated many of the Web’s possibilities — pragmatically incorporating multimedia and links, and staggering their content from online updates to offline analysis. But they have failed to radically restructure their model, and it is unclear how they can. The theory is that compelling content will find a way, whatever the medium it’s cased in, that a good piece of writing can exist across platforms. Except that it’s not that simple — content itself has to shift shape along with user preferences. The Web frees text of many of print’s petty strictures: headlines and hooks mutate, size is flexible. And yet, the mainstream media is reluctant to cast off beloved, well-worn templates. On the other hand, the blogosphere is brimming with ideas on how to invigorate dead-tree media, retool journalistic skillsets and make money online. Some suggest that traditional media outlets must learn to function like a mothership, letting popular writers build online mini-worlds and communities around their work. Others suggest that newspapers concentrate on deep analysis and literary standards — content to be an island of coherence and good sense in a sea of shallow user-generated content.

Whatever the ultimate form it takes, journalism is probably in no real trouble. The question is really not what a newspaper is, but what a newspaper does. The accountability and sense of public mission are not easily replaceable except by some other system where reporters will have similar stakes in accuracy. And for all the cleverness of crowds, citizen media are probably not going to supplant professional journalism, but flourish alongside. As happens with any media transition, the superfluous functions of the older medium wither away. But the troubling and as yet unclear matter is how newspapers will mould themselves around the Web, and crucially, how they will be monetised. Newspapers’ online audiences in the US and Europe are flourishing, having long surpassed print readerships. But unfortunately, there’s no clinching way of making money from that, because audiences demand news for free on tap. They might be the sourcewell for most of the blogs and aggregators — providing credible, institutionally backed primary reportage that is later recombined on the Web — but it’s too bad no one’s quite figured out the right price for this admittedly valuable mediation.

In a sign of the times, Tina Brown, whose previous media stints include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Miramax, has now created news aggregator The Daily Beast. As she put it in an interview to Portfolio magazine, “Since nothing is working anywhere under the sun, you may as well play your best ideas. I mean, let the Darwinism begin!”

amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com