This article is in response to “The End of Free News” by Yulin Zhuang.

No, The New York Times will not die.

Neither will The Washington Post; at the very least, their robust national circulation and storied history will make them viable—if not necessarily profitable—arms of whatever multinational conglomerate currently owns them or may own them in the future. No, what we should be worried about are the Chicago Tribunes and the Los Angeles Times of the nation, the Houston Chronicles and the Sacramento Bees. The non-national papers are the ones that will suffer the most from the current newspaper crisis, and in some ways they are the ones most critical for the lifeblood of the American journalistic institution.

Having a robust paid searchable news database is an admirable idea and would certainly be appreciated by the public; but it’s a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. Again, the top handful of national newspapers would benefit since those are what people would turn to when they want to “search the news,” but the locals would be left behind. Why are locals so important? Because although blogs are certainly usurping many of the functions that the public look for from the news, there is one function of the papers that cannot be easily replaced by blogs; there is one function that will suffer the most from the death of the local newspaper. That function is in-depth investigative journalism.

The main public good fostered by the newspaper has never been straight reportage of the facts, as both Yulin and I have pointed out. It’s always been investigative journalists, the same people who broke the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, FISA and Abu Ghraib.

These were not stories that just broke of their own accord—the wire services and blogs are good at beating the papers to the punch on that. These were stories that required intensive and extensive research and cultivation of sources and contacts—and they rely on the print newspaper (or its equivalent) to do their jobs. Television news, for all it can do, just does not have the time or depth to do the same, besides the handful of newsmagazine shows like Frontline and 60 Minutes.

Investigative journalism requires two things: 1) a professional class with 2) access and credibility. The first item is simple enough; while bloggers will happily work for free to spout their opinions and interpretations of things over the internet, fewer are willing to sit through hours and hours of council meetings and dig through archives to track a story—and those that do need to be able to support themselves doing it. They need an institution.

The second item is that journalists, by their virtue of being anointed as such, can gain access to people and places that most normal people cannot. Sources and whistle-blowers trust the protection and confidentiality of a Washington Post correspondent more than someone from DailyKos or Drudge Report. And when it is critical for the public to believe in the authenticity of a piece of news, The New York Times simply has more credibility, rightly or wrongly, than anything from The Huffington Post.

So investigative journalism is good. What does this have to do with local papers, again? Locals are where this journalism gets its start. They are important both as the training grounds for national journalism and in and of themselves.

To the first point: like any profession, journalism is tiered, with the Times and the Post as the big dogs. Journalists claw their way up to the summit—for every senior White House correspondent, there are 50 reporters covering state governments, and 500 covering city councils. These second-and-third-strings are critical parts of the cycle; what use is it if national-circulation papers are saved when the people who will fill those jobs in the future were forced out of the profession by the death of locals?

The second point is that journalistic oversight of business and government and all our public institutions needs to cover the whole spectrum. We don’t only need journalists covering the trillions of dollars flowing through Congress; to stop corruption and waste we need to track the individual billions disbursed to states and the millions disbursed to cities. We need coverage of city councils just as much as coverage of the White House, of small businesses as much as multinational corporations.

Any proposed solution to the newspaper crisis which does not focus on the problem of local newspapers will just simply not work—they are the ones with the most antiquated and hopeless economic models, and were it not for the public good they serve, probably deserve to fade away. This will probably require radical action; one interesting proposal I’ve seen involved the conversion of the newspaper system to an almost public-academic model—a print version of NPR or the BBC. Some local newspapers would be partially or wholly supported by government funding (but with a wall of separation to prevent the equivalent of regulatory capture). Other papers would be supported by, or become part of universities, which would lend their credibility and focus on the public good. There is already a framework of journalism schools across the nation which prepare students for the field; it would take a drastic but not catastrophic shift to make these schools the locus of journalism rather than just the training camp for it.

Good journalism may not be economically viable or even popular. But it’s absolutely necessary for the life of a country.