[Tchocky]

A nation needs newspapers. Simple as. Decent article from last weeks' Independent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...s-1649488.html

Obvious point is that a newspaper writer will encourage this. THey're all communists anyway.

A recent study in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organisation found that one of the biggest single factors in reducing corruption in a country is "the free circulation of daily newspapers per person." Go to any country, and you'll find that the lower the newspaper circulation, the higher the corruption. If nobody's watching, anything goes.
As inky news-gatherers vanish, there is a vacuum that online journalists are not able to fill. With less advertising cash and no upfront payments from the readers at all, they have far less money to send out foreign correspondents, assign people to tricky investigations, or do the long slog that journalism so often requires. Look at the best political site, the Huffington Post, for which – in the interests of full disclosure – I should point out I write. As they are the first to admit, HufPo pays nothing to its contributors, and it knows what is happening in the world only because newspapers send out correspondents. If they vanish, blogs will be left in an airless cabin, talking only about themselves.
This doesn't have to happen. Many people in the increasingly frantic newspaper industry whisper about potential techno-solutions. Some say an easy system of online micro-payments – an i-Tunes for the news – will save us. Others invest hope in the Kindle, the hand-held device on which you can buy a newspaper. But we can't afford to wait for them to go mainstream: journalism's accumulated structures, brands and wisdom could be lost forever by then.
There is a better way. In an age of bailouts, several European governments are experimenting with ways to support the world of news-gathering so it will survive for the 21st century. The best plan has come from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He has launched a programme where every French citizen, on her 18th birthday, will be given a year's free subscription to a newspaper of her choice. The effects are subtle. Many young readers will develop a newspaper habit. In turn, newspapers will compete harder to capture this lucrative guaranteed market, and make their product accessible and fresh. A benevolent whirl replaces the current death-spiral.
Of course there is a terrible danger in making newspapers dependent on the government's actions. Nobody wants that. But there are ways to avoid this trap. In 1971, the Swedish government set up a system of subsidies to newspapers allocated by an independent body on the basis of circulation and revenue data. Intriguingly, the Swedish press became more adversarial and critical after it was introduced, not less.