Reilly’s already hit this first bit, but it bears repeating: Damn, this is one restrained bit of reporting. For anyone, really, but especially for Alterman, who’s… yeah, you know. The fact that Alterman didn’t heap even a bit of blame for the newspaper industry’s current woes on right-wing vampires is, well, jaw dropping. Kid should get an award for this fact alone.

Still, while the reporting is solid and nuanced and restrained and all, the conclusions Alterman draws from his reporting are terrifying.

Take, for instance, the fact that newspaper companies are getting hammered on Wall Street. That’s not news to anybody. But it also doesn’t mean that publicly traded papers are worthless because traders say they are, nor does it mean that these papers will never be profitable. All it does mean that they are highly unlikely, in the foreseeable future, to post the kind of robust growth that stockholders rightly demand. So the solution isn’t to abandon papers altogether, but to find a different business model, built on nonprofit mechanisms and private owners comfortable with lower than usual rates of return on their money.

Then there’s the argument that the liberal blogosphere’s ability to “bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community” represents “genuinely democratic discourse,” since, “Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals.”

Think about that for a second. These conversations are Deweyan, are genuinely democratic, because they’re taking place “within a like-minded community.” That is, within a self-congratulatory echo chamber full of chimps screeching in unison and throwing handfuls of muck at each other for lack of anything better to do. The liberal blogs Alterman cites may mobilize bodies and generate noise, but the very fact that they’re like-minded – often, militantly so – doesn’t mean that they fuel “genuinely democratic discourse.” It just means that the blogs’ readers don’t have to talk to themselves to hear themselves talk.

Alterman does call out Arianna Huffington for failing to address the “parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers.” But he seems to shrug off the consequences of the parasites will wreak on their hosts:

[W]e are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

Uh, yeah. And, no thanks. Equally terrifying is Alterman allowing Huffington to argue that “wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting” can pick up the slack when the big and medium-sized papers fold, because “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom.”

The fact is, the biggest, most important stories newspapers report on – the type of stories that newspapers exist to cover in the first place – can’t be done by anyone but nonpartisan professionals with significant resources behind them. Hyperlocal blogs may be able to cover town politics just fine, but if it weren’t for the Globe‘s Spotlight Team, and the paper’s significant legal budget, Cardinal Law wouldn’t be on Roman vacation right now, and BC wouldn’t be terrorizing its neighbors. That’s one story, and a whole host of significant ramifications.

The implications are greater on a national and international scale. Imagine what Bush-bashing would sound like without Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretaps, SWIFT banking, or signing statements. Among many, many others. Imagine what Alterman’s national narrative looks like without that agreed-upon set of facts. It ain’t pretty. Alterman mentions that “brazenly partisan newspapers” got along just fine in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; what’s not mentioned are the staggering levels of political and economic corruption that flourished under the partisan press.

So the answer isn’t to shrug off the death of newspapers as reporting organs (versus newspapers as ink-stained dead trees) while shrugging off the supremacy of the partisan internet, but to figure out, at all costs, how to stave off that death in the first place. The alternative isn’t anything any of us should want to see.