There's been no shortage of predictions about the demise of the newspaper industry, as more people turn to the Internet for the news and turn away from the hard-copy editions of newspapers. But much of the discussion has been grossly oversimplified.

That's why an article in the March 31 edition of the New Yorker magazine intrigued me so much. While I don't agree with the article's general premise that newspapers indeed will be extinct in the not-so-distant future, “Out of Print: The death and life the American newspaper,” written by Eric Alterman, raises all kinds of thought-provoking questions about the impact of a shift that is certainly taking place.

The article, which you can find at www.newyorker.com with a quick search for the word “Alterman,” devotes considerable space to imagining what the loss of newspaper journalism would mean to society.

Alterman views the future of news as being based largely on the model of blog-based Web sites such as The Huffington Post. The site aggregates what its editors view as the most thought-provoking news stories out there at the time, mixes them with opinion pieces by its bloggers and invites the rest of the world to contribute their own thoughts and news.

It's a site that's grown visitors exponentially, and its founder seems to scoff at how newspapers remain stuck in their old way of doing things.

But those who argue that the Huffington Post is the future of news overlook some key factors. First of all, for all of its popularity and growth, Huffington Post is merely breaking even financially. Much like the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s, there's not much of a long-term future for any business model that isn't turning consistent profits.

Secondly, Huffington Post and many other blog-heavy, aggregating sites still rely on traditional news media stories as the basis for their content and their opinions.

No one comes close to the newspaper industry in terms of the investments it makes in newsgathering, even if those investments are growing smaller. Alterman sees this reality as a major cause of worry.

“It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know,” he writes.

But Alterman's fear is the reason why I'm convinced newspaper-style journalism will endure. Whether it's on a computer screen or a piece of newsprint, the public will always demand a certain level of information about what's going on in the neighborhood, community, state, country and world. And without that information, the Huffington Posts of the world will no longer be interesting enough to check out.

The real winners will be the companies that figure out a way to combine the best of both approaches.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's columns appear Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net