(Editor's note: This is a response to the editorial that ran Feb. 11 in the West Seattle Herald and Ballard News-Tribune.)

Dear Editor,

This is a brave, but essentially futile argument. To deal with the strawman elements of your argument first:

1. You don’t have to listen to the firehose of tweets and liveblogging. Blogging produces the compact summaries as well. And there are blogs that are beating newspaper levels of smart and authoritative summarization.

2. Online advertising: when you do the math right, your ‘print is better’ claim is quite simply, WRONG for many markets (especially long-tail and niche) today, and will be wrong for most in about 5 years. You clearly are basing your analysis on wishful thinking. I know exactly how many people click on ads on my blog, and enough people do to keep Google in business.

As for the rest of your editorial, I am afraid I can only think ‘ostrich in sand.’ If you are looking for quaint, vinyl record levels of survival, I have no argument: that will definitely be possible. If you want something like radio’s levels of survival in the face of TV (which is far more robust), that will be impossible without some very fundamental changes in how print is done. The numbers just don’t add up. You want evidence, look (irony rules) at the @themediaisdying twitter stream. I am sure you are familiar with Phil Meyer’s “The Vanishing Newspaper.” There was a recent report (Gartner I think) that predicted that 1 in 10 newspapers in UK will vanish in 2009. The NYT is hanging on for dear life. Gannett had the largest layoffs in its history. “...are doing quite well though in an economic downturn some evolution is necessary for all media” is classic denial in the Kubler-Ross mode. You’ll get to anger and the other stages soon.

The one substantive point you raise is about the ability of properly coordinated crowd/citizen journalism/blogging (purely online) to deliver the same value for a democracy, in a profitable way, as professional journalism. I won’t say that’s a done deal, but good ideas are coming up every day in that sphere, while the ability of newspapers to deliver that kind of value is diminishing by the hour, as more investigative reporters are laid off.

Oddly enough, my work involves finding ways to help print survive, since I work for a major print equipment company. I see many things that can be done, and am pursuing some of them. But denying harsh realities is not among the more productive things to do.

 Venkatesh Rao
Seattle