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Most media gurus agree that the paper-and-ink newspaper is on the decline and will eventually become a relic.

If a market for news content still exists, it’s believed, newspaper organizations will just have to adapt their methods of delivery.

The rationale: people have to get their news from somewhere, right?

This model worked well for a long time. But it has come unstuck in the internet era as readers have shifted their attention to other media, quickly followed by advertisers.

It may be a business, but it also plays an important part in a democracy: holding those in power to account, giving voters the information they need to make choices and making markets more efficient.

Having long made content available free online, news providers are starting to restrict access to some or all of it to paying subscribers.

Newspapers are under-charging for the value they deliver.

Newspapers have a powerful business model for advertisers; they simply do not apply it to their subscribers and readers.

newspapers have something of value to sell: Intelligence.

Enter the Internet news voucher. Under our proposal, each news article on the web will end by asking readers whether it contributed to their political understanding. If so, they can click the yes-box, and send the message to a National Endowment for Journalism -- which would obtain an annual appropriation from the government. This money would be distributed to news organizations on the basis of a strict mathematical formula: the more clicks, the bigger the check from the Endowment.

a news organization must have a group of editors and fact-checkers committed to journalistic integrity.

Although the Internet may have destroyed the newspaper's old business model, we can use it to create a new decentralized system that may generate an even more vibrant marketplace of ideas for the twenty-first century.

In 2008, newspapers made $37.848 billion. Yes, they made a full $10 billion more last year than they did this year, a staggering drop of 27.2%. Nearly all of that loss was from print:

In 2000, newspapers peaked at $48.67 billion in revenue. This came entirely from print

The old newspaper model is simply not going to be market-viable as we head deeper in the digital age

"Community newspapers certainly are not immune to the economic downturn that is affecting all businesses, but, as the primary and sometimes sole provider of local news in a community, they remain strong and viable," NNA president John Stevenson said in the article.

"Everybody Gets It. Everybody Reads It."

Ingenuity, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit always have been rewarded.