Scott Green

Walk into the newsroom of any major paper and you’ll see, hard at work, hordes of gainfully employed Americans with no fear of losing their jobs.

These people are repo men. The journalists are the ones cowering under their desks, churning out article after article about how newspapers are dying.

Things used to be better. In the golden days of journalism (March 7-12, 1905) newspapers were advocates of the people. “Muckraking” reporters wrote stories about which factory violated safety codes or what conglomerate used slave labor or whose meatpacking plant put rat parts in hot dogs. “More disgusting hot dog stories,” golden era editors were always bellowing.

Reporters who covered these beats were the Michael Moores of their time, only skinnier, because they were terrified of hot dogs. They produced a product people wanted, and were so satisfied with their jobs that no one ever left to start a blog.

It’s not like that anymore. Today’s newspaper stories fall into two categories:

1. Op-ed pieces about how newspapers are dying because, for some unknown reason, people find the Internet more interesting.

2. Articles about the latest Internet fads and how interesting they are.

The problems started when every publication put its content online for free. At first it was just one paper, but they all followed because of a herd mentality in journalism that I wouldn’t have mentioned if I hadn’t read about it other places first.

At this point you are thinking: “Hey! Why not just stop giving their product away? Wouldn’t charging money fix everything?” Clearly you are not as savvy as the trained professionals in the journalism industry, who understand that the solution to this problem must be innovative enough to set the blogosphere on fire. (Otherwise nobody would find out about it.)

There actually are a handful of journalists who think charging for content is the way to go. A couple months ago Time published an article in which Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor at the magazine, suggested news organizations charge two or three cents per story viewed on their Web sites.

This is a brilliant plan that would succeed completely, at least in raising two or three cents per article, total. After the first guy paid he’d post it on his blog, where the rest of the world could read it for free.

No, in order for the pay-per-view system to work, publications would have to charge two or three hundred thousand dollars per article, and the only way to get that kind of money would be selling to Donald Trump stories that reflect very positively on Donald Trump. This is the concept behind my new $3 million-per-copy book, “Mark Cuban Kicks Ass: A Guide To America’s Most Awesome Person.”

Other methods I’ve seen advocated include switching to an online-only format, switching to a print-only format, switching to a print-and-online-only format, and publishing vicious gossip about anyone who cancels his subscription.

But really, journalists just need to return to our roots, to the stories that made American newspapers great in the first place: ads for indentured servants and reports of whose wife was burned for what kind of witchcraft.

Also we should remember the lessons learned from our muckraking days. Corporations are still doing bad things, and hot dogs are still bad for you. What I’m saying is, maybe unsold papers can be sold to meat plants as filler.

Scott is a third-year law student.