"Some professional journalists have a sense that they are like polar bears pacing pack and forth in high anxiety as the ice around them melts away."

That's a good way to put it. I've been working for newspapers for 35 years and I didn't start becoming nervous about the future of the profession until a year or two ago.

The quote is from a book called "Losing the News."  It's written by Alex S. Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and frequently cited media authority. His family has owned a 15,000-circulation newspaper in Greenville, Tenn. for four generations.

This is the first book I've run across on the subject, although of course I've read plenty of articles about it, both online and in print.

ln addressing the anxieties journalists face  in times of declining circulation and revenues, he's not reassuring.

He writes that the nation's newspaper companies will survive and eventually thrive again. "It may not be as healthy in terms of profit as it was in the lush 1980s, but I have been too long in the newspaper business to believe it won't find a way to survive in some form."

But he's not so confident that the business will continue to  have news as its central mission. "The great problem for the nation's newspapers is not whether they can save themselves, but whether they can do so without losing their meaningful public service mission.

"They have been businesses built around reporting and providing news  that their communities want and need. I fear newspapers are trending overwhelmingly around what people want, and all but abandoning anything that doesn't make money or draw eyeballs."

In making these assertions, he's aware that his ideas are a little out of date. Part of the current thinking is how dare we tell readers what they need.

Jones is worried about the loss of  what he calls the "iron core" of newspaper content. He divides this into three categories: bearing witness to events, explanatory news and investigative journalism. He writes that even in the best-regarded newspapers, the iron core has never made up more than 15 percent of the content. Half the space is devoted to advertising and the remaining 35 percent is taken up by what he calls "crowd-pleasing news."

But with newspapers in financial trouble, he  believes owners' concerns about the costs of what he calls "accountability reporting" are causing the iron core to shrink.

This is certainly true at the largest newspapers.

For me, huge metropolitan dailies might as well be a fantasy world.  Jones writes that a few years ago the Los Angeles Times allowed three reporters to work for three years on one  investigative series. It had a huge effect on the community, but cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce.
 
With such formerly extravagant news budgets, it's not surprising that the "iron core" has been jeopardized  by round after round  of staff cuts cuts. Smaller newspapers have been frugal in the best of times, and so it has been easier for them to adjust to lean times.

Although Jones is  worried that  finding a profitable business model  may hurt what he calls the "public stewardship" side of newspapers, he's skeptical of  the whole concept of  newspapers supported by foundations. "Funders can change their minds, get mad, get bored or simply want to do something different."

He writes that turning newspapers into nonprofits, thereby reducing the financial  pressure, is an appealing model, but  believes it will rarely happen, as most newspapers have multiple stakeholders "who are unlikely to give away what is likely their principal asset."

He also balks at the trend of  newspapers allowing members of the community to cover news events. "The hyper-localism of many papers requires everything be covered, and a convenient and inexpensive way to do it is to recruit unpaid volunteers who do the best they can. Some of them can do the job of any professional and follow the same ethical standards of impartiality. But this arrangement can be exploitative and it is unreliable in the long term."

So if the present business model isn't working, new profit-making efforts are eroding news coverage and every alternative has its drawbacks, what does he suggest?

"Journalists must hold fast and persevere," he writes. "Owners must do the right thing and news consumers must notice and demand the news they need."

In other words, we should all just be good people. I suppose we could be, but I wouldn't count on it. Newspapers have been successful  because they  melded commerce, entertainment and community service. But the current  financial challenges have upset this equilibrium, and we may have to accept that things will never go back being to the way they were.