I love Maureen Dowd’s wit and usually find her columns entertaining. However, of late she’s been on a bandwagon blaming pretty much everyone and everything from bloggers to cable news for causing the death of newspapers. Her column yesterday took an enjoyable albeit misguided twist on the theme by tying in the new Star Trek prequel. Still, I must point out, that Mr. Spock at any age would not find her arguments logical.

First, let’s acknowledge that newspapers have historically played a valuable public service role in hard-nosed journalism. Breaking the Watergate scandal is a vivid example of such. But we need to keep in mind, that while reporters may have been motivated by public service, the newspapers themselves were motivated by the increased sales, and hence the increased ad revenue, that such a story would bring. Newspapers have always been motivated by selling ads. I learned many years ago while working on a newspaper publishing system that newspapers are laid out around the ads. What remains are called “news holes” and are filled with whatever stories fit that space. The size of a newspaper never exceeds the ads.

Further, there is this misguided notion that people who subscribe to newspapers are “paying for news.” And that news based websites that give away news for free have been destroying that model. The subscription price for a newspaper only covers printing and distribution. That has always been sort of a zero-sum game. The news itself is payed for by advertising, and that model continues on the web today. But since the distribution and printing costs have gone to zero, so has the user subscription fee.

Let’s also look at the content of a typical newspaper’s news. The vast majority of it is fact based reports of events. Investigative journalism, while important, is not even a daily feature. And the reality is that with the advent of 24-hour cable news and the Internet, the newspaper is probably the slowest least efficient way of obtaining all the fact-based news. This is what is driving advertisers to other media, and consequently, what is killing the newspaper industry.

In the end, I too am concerned about the lack of hard-nosed investigative journalism. Newspapers are inexorably dying. The news networks may pick up some of the slack, but largely seem to spend their days watching each other’s broadcasts and snooping the web for fodder to fill the air time. So I’m not optimistic about that. I think there is an opportunity here for a new business model to emerge that supports this sort of public watchdog activity. I expect that this sort of breaking news is still monetizable. Maybe not directly to the end user, but I suspect CNN would pay for a juicy scoop. They could recoup that in ad sales easily. There are doubtless other and better models out there as well. And the reality of our capitalistic system is that something will rise to fill that void.

I think this model demands there to be a period where newspapers are dead but nothing has risen yet to fill the void. However, I would submit that we are already there. Newspapers (and mainstream news in general) seriously dropped the ball in the post 9/11 years. They sang the administration’s song with nary a thought to their public duty to expose the truth. Yes, there were a few bright spots such as the illegal wire-tapping scandal, but that broke more because of whistle blowers than reporters. Newspapers violated that public trust during the Bush years. They failed to provide the one unique value they could offer. And we all suffered for it. So it’s hard to work up too many genuine tears for this industry. In many respects, they did this to themselves.

While I hope Maureen lives long and prospers, I can’t wish the same for her industry. Sometimes it’s just time to move on.