If you wanted to increase your newspaper’s circulation, I’m not sure this, from Connecticut newspaper managing editor Chris Powell, is how to do it:

Journalism is hailing the acquisition of The Washington Post by Internet retailing entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, figuring that he has both the genius and wealth to develop a new self-sustaining model of journalism. This may be a bit presumptuous.

For as much as Bezos’ company, Amazon, has done remarkable things, its decisive business strategy was only sales tax evasion, an advantage that seems to be coming to an end as Congress prepares to enact legislation allowing states to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases. If the future of journalism rests with the Internet rather than with the old business models of declining profitability — newsprint and the broadcast airwaves — the Internet model of profitable journalism still hasn’t been invented yet. And if such a model was even close at hand, the Post under its longtime owners, the Graham family, could have well afforded to undertake it without any help from Bezos.

Further, while the decline of journalism coincides with the rise of the Internet, the Internet may not be the primary cause at all.

Certainly the Internet has given journalism a powerful competitor for public attention, just as radio and then television did. The Internet is a far more powerful competitor because, unlike radio and TV, it allows people to indulge their particular interests at any hour of the day to the exclusion of everything else, to live always in the narrowest of worlds rather than in a broad one. For example, thanks to the Internet someone well might know nearly everything about the Boston Red Sox, Miley Cyrus, and sunspots and yet be unaware that an airplane had just crashed a few streets away, that the governor had just been sent to prison for corruption, and that town government had just raised property taxes again.

That is, traditional journalism, especially newspaper journalism, remains indispensable for conveying local and state news and providing some understanding of public policy, there being few exclusively Internet-based sources of information about those things. But do local and state news and some understanding of public policy remain indispensable to most people?

Even in a supposedly prosperous and well-educated state like Connecticut, how strong can demand for those things be now that half the children are being raised without two parents at home and thus acquiring developmental handicaps; 70 percent of community college and state university freshmen have not mastered what used to be considered basic high school skills; poverty has risen steadily even as government appropriations in the name of remediating poverty have risen steadily; and democracy has sunk so much that half the eligible population isn’t voting in presidential elections, 65 percent isn’t voting in state elections, and 85 percent isn’t voting in municipal elections?

This social disintegration and decline in civic engagement coincide with the decline of traditional journalism just as much as the rise of the Internet does.

Indeed, newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households — two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population.

This, from Georgia newspaper editor Jim Zachary, is a better argument:

Newspapers are about our child’s first school field trip, a Friday night high school football game, a livestock show hosted by the agriculture extension office or an increase in our property tax rate. At least those are the things that a relevant newspaper is all about whether your read it online or sit down with a morning cup of coffee and enjoy the traditional printed edition the way it was meant to be. …

We hold public officials accountable, advocate for openness in government and champion the cause of ordinary citizens, because we are committed to the neighborhoods, cities, county and coverage area we serve.

Watered down editorial pages, articles that read like a public relations campaign for government and page after page of wire service content will never resonate in the same way as celebrating our own community and standing up for its citizens.

Newspapers hold public officials accountable because it makes the place we call home a better place to live and because it is the right thing to do.

Newspapers do not make the news.

They report it — all of it. …

The newspaper belongs to the community.

That is why we work every day to give citizens a voice, to empower them and tell their stories.

That is why we hold government accountable because at our very core we believe that government belongs to the governed and not to the governing.

That is why we embrace the newspaper’s role as the Fourth Estate.

According to historian Thomas Carlyle, Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke (1729-1797) said, “there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” (Heroes and Hero Worship in History, 1841).

Though in many places reporters have reduced themselves to simply being a mouthpiece for local government, reporting what officials want them to report and hiding what they don’t, a community and a democracy is best served when the newspaper provides a forum for checks and balances as the Fourth Estate of government.

Great newspapers, relevant newspapers that are embraced by their communities and consequently profitable, growing newspapers have not forgotten that role and have not abandoned these values.

We are not the enemy of government — rather we are the champions of citizens — of our community.

We know if newspapers do not stand up for citizens and protect the rights of free speech and the rights of access to government, then no one will.

We work each day to build a culture and incubate an environment where those elected feel accountable to those who elected them.

Newspapers should be the most powerful advocate citizens have and be their open forum for a redress of grievances.

Any newspaper that represents the interests of the governing, more than the interests of the governed, is not worth the paper it is printed on or the ink that fills its pages.