A world without daily newspapers?

The plot of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 revolves around a totalitarian society where the printed word is banned. That means no daily newspapers.

We're a long way from such a society, but daily newspapers, paper newspapers that is, could be as anachronistic as a fountain pen, Crain's Chicago Business suggests:

Plunging advertising revenue and shrinking circulation have already pushed Chicago's two biggest daily newspapers into bankruptcy. The next step — unthinkable to many even a year ago — could be more dramatic: The daily printed newspaper could become a relic of the city's past.

"The economic model for newspapers is broken," says Geneva Overholser, dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism, who remembers reading four Chicago dailies as a Northwestern University journalism student in 1971. "I'd be real worried if I were in Chicago about whether we end up with any newspaper at all."

One local newspaper boss, Sun-Times Media Group CEO Jeremy Halbreich, is adamant that the Sun-Times will remain a seven-day-a-week printed publication. But his determination may be overtaken by more powerful forces.

The potential demise of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times as they exist today is provoking debate among journalists, academics and readers who fret that without the dailies' big, expensive newsrooms, Chicago will lose its watchdogs.

Daily newspapers, as Crain's goes on to explain, perform crucial investigatory work, such as the Sun-Times' lengthy series on Chicago's Hired Truck scandal. I've never worked for a newspaper, but to produce something like that, or the Wichita Eagle's detailed coverage of the BTK killer, you need multiple bodies under one roof.

But Crain's points out a couple of web models that will attempt to fill the void, including local outlets, including the Beachwood Reporter and Chi-Town Daily News.

If newspapers do fail, some of those ad dollars will be looking for a home. Here's the tricky part: classifieds. Craig's List and eBay, among others, have dried up this newspaper cash cow.

How do you incorporate classifieds into a blog? That's that's the billion dollar question.

If I come up with the answer, I'm calling a copyright attorney.

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