A sense of inevitable doom hangs over the print journalism industry. Subscriptions and advertising revenue have plummeted, and nobody can figure out how to leverage newspaper websites into a viable revenue stream.  Unless some visionary gamechanger (Rupert Murdoch?) can figure out how to turn pageviews into cash, newspapers will continue to shrink until they fold altogether. And while there are some promising models of for-profit news-gathering websites (on Monday, the Times ran a feature on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's resurgence as a website) most industry analysts predict that news-gathering will be severely curtailed, with many stories simply going uncovered for lack of resources. 

The impending death of newspapers presents a grave challenge for the next generation of Americans.   Inherent in our democratic system is an assumption that citizens can make somewhat informed political and electoral decisions.  But without an apparatus for news-gathering and fact-checking, citizens will either be misinformed or left in the dark on a number of issues--especially issues like local corruption.  As Thomas Jefferson once said: "Were it left for me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not heistate a moment to prefer the latter."   Tomorrow's children--who are likely to be raised in a world without substantial news reporting--are likely to be a generation of stunningly ill-informed voters.  

But newspapers have tremendous value for kids well before they reach legal voting age, as they often provide young people with an initial window to the outside world.  Many newspapers are written at a 3rd-8th grade reading level, so newspapers are texts that even struggling readers can pick up and understand.  And the stories in local newspapers tend to pique kids' interests.  When I was teaching eighth grade in the Bronx, many kids would pick up the New York Post on the way to school and read it during their downtime, drawn in by the intensely local focus, the tabloid-esque headlines, and the sensationalistic stories.  Of course, the Post is not my newspaper of choice, nor would I consider it a paradigm of great journalism.  But the Post get my students reading, and it got them reading actual news, thus allowing them to become better acquainted with the world around them.  (Plus, their familiarity with the Post made my lessons on yellow journalism so much easier for them to understand).  

In addition to giving students easily palatable, interesting texts on subjects that actually matter, students can learn a tremendous amount by writing and publishing their own school newspaper.  When students emulate the ideal of journalistic objectivity that newspapers (theoretically) embody, they are learning to distinguish fact from opinion and news from propaganda.  This is a distinction that is blurred by the blogosphere and TV news channels, but one that old-fashioned newspapers--with their "news" and "opinion" sections--still technically make explicitly.  Of course, the demise of for-profit newspapers does not necessarily make school newspapers obsolete.  But it seems ludicrous to think that future students and schools will be particularly motivated to emulate an anachronistic form of communication.  Telegraph club, anybody?

On a personal level, the demise of print journalism is quite painful for me to watch, as so many parts of my own childhood were intricately shaped by newspapers.  In elementary school, I had my own paper route for the Ann Arbor News, and I would look forward to the end of my route each day when I could read the extra paper that the newspaper provided its carriers.  Perhaps because I was already so familiar with journalism, my favorite class in middle school was a journalism course in which seventh and eighth graders wrote, edited and published a deliciously irreverant publication known as the Tappan Tabloid.  Having been instilled at an early age with a love for newspapers, I stayed involved with journalism throughout my educational career, becoming an editor on both my high school and college papers.  When I taught in the Bronx, not only did I integrate newspapers into my curriculum, I also started a school newspaper club.  (Mimicking larger societal trends, perhaps, the publication started as a printed newspaper entitled "CIS 339 School Post," but has since become a web-only publication called The 339 Hardline).

Last month, the Ann Arbor News folded, leaving my hometown without a daily newspaper and dozens of little paperboys without an after-school job or an extra newspaper to read.  There's no easy way to fill the voids created by local papers. Some aspects of these publications were simply irreplacable, and our democracy is going to suffer until their news-gathering function, at least, can be rescued.  Insofar as newspaper affect eductation, it's ultimately up to the schools--and us as philanthropists--to ensure that at least some of the fundamental lessons that newspapers have provided do not fall by the wayside.