If the New York Times dies, does the news die?

The death of an institution isn’t far off, writes the Atlantic in an article titled End Times, and with it an entire industry may be preparing to slip underwater. Low on cash, high in debt, the legendary New York Times is reeling from the recession. There’s no guarantee that it, or many others of our best newspapers, will survive the next year.

The immediate effect of the Times ending its storied run (or degrading to a lesser entity) will no doubt be the journalistic equivalent of a nuclear explosion. Journalists love writing about journalism, and all the old bromides will be dragged out, chief among them the accusation that print has not evolved: it simply needs to join the internet age.

Alas, the criticism will be misguided. The New York Times has done an excellent job of growing its web property. ComScore says the company’s pageviews are approaching 200 million a month; that’s a lot for any website. Other newspapers have also done well, just not nearly well enough. In fact, “well enough” might be impossible in current conditions. Newspapers are being asked to multiply their audiences many times over, not just shift to a new medium.

Once print (including magazines) implodes, all that will be left is internet journalism, the pundits suggest — an inferior product that delves only lightly into most subjects, and not at all into others. Most people, including internet journalists, agree that print is the last bastion of the educated essay and the investigative article.

Here’s the Atlantic on the terrible consequence of our newspapers’ decline:

…the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere … Under the guise of “service,” The Times has been on a steady march toward temporarily profitable lifestyle fluff. Escapes! Styles! T magazine(s)! For a time, this fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting, and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants.

The Atlantic’s conclusion to the above argument is that the print survivors will be forced to cut down on the fluff and focus on their specialties, on building brands with high-quality journalism. The Times, obviously, is good at long-form, in-depth pieces for an educated crowd.

But, as the Atlantic itself also pointed out, fluff has been supporting more weighty productions for a long time. Like it or not, 60-word fluff articles on sites like Gizmodo and Perez Hilton often rack up more pageviews than the vaunted five-part Pulitzer Prize contenders the Atlantic bemoans. News sites need massive traffic to pay the bills; fluff is what draws traffic. Length and quality remain excellent ways to lose a lot of money, unless your writers work for free.

Missing from all the prescriptions we’ve seen for reviving good journalism on the web is an explanation of how it will pay for itself. Getting a New York Times-caliber feature article requires paying a Times-caliber writer for a week or more of research and writing. That will set you back between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on who is doing the work. That figure doesn’t include the editing and expenses, by the way.

For most sites, that means they need 100,000 to a million pageviews to break even, for a single article. These economics serve to explain why web writers get paid considerably less. Of course, workers who are paid less tend not to perform as well. It’s a