Will newspapers keep their soul?

In other words, although the younger and better-educated consumers of serious news may be hungry for more analysis and interpretation, they're increasingly turned off not only by Fox's partisanship but also by CNN's and MSNBC's opportunistic attempts to match the ratings success of Rupert Murdoch's network. It's clear all three cable networks, whatever their politics, have decided it's anger that sells in their medium, and that's where they've settled. Thus we have right-wing anger (Fox's Bill O'Reilly), left-wing anger (MSNBC's Keith Olbermann), faux-populist anger (CNN's Lou Dobbs) and crypto-fascist rage (Headline's Nancy Grace).

So, we're back to where we started: Sooner rather than later, the newspaper you're holding in your hands will be very different from what it is today.

Different in what way is the fair and obvious question.

The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, but the odds are it will be a hybrid publication in which an online edition that's focused mainly on breaking news and service works in tandem with a print edition whose staples are analysis, context and opinion. The former almost surely will have a lot more video and interactivity than it does today; the latter will have to be much more thoughtful and far more intensely and carefully edited.

It's a difficult -- though not impossible -- transition, and the scandal of cable news' failed transformation provides a cautionary example. As Fox and CNN demonstrate to the rest of the news media, it's possible to save your financial skin and forfeit any claim on respect. It's an old problem. Saul of Tarsus, a one-time tentmaker whose letters made him a kind of media celebrity two millenniums ago, put it plainly: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

So how do American newspapers manage this passage while holding on to their "souls" -- that sense that they are, uniquely, businesses worthy of constitutional protection because their bottom line reckons service to the common good alongside profit and loss?