Newspapers are failing all over the country, right? It’s inevitable that the industry will thin out, be winnowed down to the strongest few papers, but there will always be a certain demographic — Luddites, cruciverbalists, grandparents — that enjoys their ink-shedding paper over coffee, right?

Okay, so, the weakest papers will fall first, probably in “small town America,” leaving behind hundreds of unused printing presses all over the country.

The telecommunication infrastructure is already in place — why can’t the survivor papers (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, etc.) bundle up a digital version of their daily edition and beam it out to every failed newspaper office in rural America? It’d take a skeleton crew to maintain the printing press and make deliveries.

Local news would suffer, no doubt, but no more so than shuttering the local press altogether.

I, for one, would jump at the chance to have the New York Times dropped on my Juneau, Alaska doorstep every morning at 5am (which shouldn’t be a problem what with the 3 time zones between us!)

I would add that newspapers got a strong weak point: they still think that in the Internet era they need to be scandalistic…

Take a look at what respectable bloggers write when they collaborate with printed media: usually their articles looks so 1.0 so I feel that if NYT and TIME will collpase it will be positive for the news industry and bloggers will start to overcome their inferiority complex toward “journalists”…