These are dire times for the newspaper industry. In the past year, The Tribune Company has filed for bankruptcy, the New York Times  has acquired hundreds of millions in debt, and the venerable Christian Science Monitor has been forced to scale back to just one weekly print edition. The recent announcement that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is for sale only serves to reinforce the sense that print journalism is on its way out. Credit analysts at Fitch Ratings predict that “several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”

The business model that print publishers have followed for over a century is obsolete. Revenue from classified ads, once the lifeblood of small regional papers, has been siphoned off by sites like Craigslist, that allow people to advertise their wares for free. Internet advertising has failed to fill the coffers of either big or small papers.

Newspapers have to compete with a broader range of media than ever before. They are now being undermined by web sites that can deliver more information more cheaply and more quickly than any print publication.

Aggregator sites like the liberal Huffington Post hardly even pay for content, instead providing links to other people’s writing — much of it belonging to the very paper-and-ink dinosaurs with whom they compete — or soliciting blog posts from high-profile celebrities.

Fewer and fewer content providers maintain the pretense of being impartial or balanced. The ubiquity of the Internet has allowed them to cater profitably to a smaller, more ideologically homogenous group. Whereas newspapers were under market pressure to appeal to broad audiences, innumerable Internet “news” sites can survive by carving out psychographic niches.

The result of this fragmentation is the creation of what former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges calls “ideological ghettos”: echo chambers where the discussion only serves to reinforce readers’ preexisting prejudices. The typical reader of the right-wing Drudge Report, for example, isn’t very likely to balance his media diet by visiting Slate or Salon.

The explosion of Internet news-gathering hasn’t just added more options to the menu, it’s also changed the way we consume news itself.

In a Truthdig.com article written in July 2007, Hedges claims that “the Web is built for browsing rather than reading.” In support of this statement, he notes that the average reader of the print version of the New York Times spends 45 minutes reading the paper, whereas the average visitor to the NYT web site spends only seven minutes there.

Hedges sees the modern consumer’s unwillingness to devote time to in-depth news analyses or investigative pieces as a bane on our democracy. Hedges suggests that the media that fosters our ridiculously short attention spans will rob us of the ability to think critically, leaving us to be ruled by despots who can easily manipulate our collective will.

In his apocalyptic vision of the new media landscape, there are several possibilities that Hedges does not entertain. The most glaring is that the seven-minute NYT visitor might be consulting a broad number of sources on the same topic, adding nuance to what would otherwise be  a one-dimensional view of an event.

While they might not sit still for a five-part investigative piece on it, they may be constructing an understanding of it that is just as rich. Painstaking scrutiny isn’t just about the time one spends looking at something, its about the patterns that one is able to identify, and the details they can single out and bring together into a coherent narrative.

Our ability to digest and interpret information isn’t degraded by browsing. In fact, it is enriched.

Cristobal Matibag is a senior in pre-journalism and mass communication from Ames.