Every day thousands of people click through and comment on the online edition of this newspaper and dozens of other regional publications, without paying for the experience. That is exactly as it should be, especially since most of this readership lives abroad and cannot buy print editions. But the loss of print revenues which the Internet has occasioned could eventually force newspapers everywhere to a moment of reckoning, in which they have to choose between survival of their print and online editions. Right now that dilemma is being faced head-on, with very mixed results, in the United States.

The launch of the iPad, Apple’s latest touchscreen computer, has set off a flurry of speculation as to whether lightweight electronic reading devices may yet save America’s ailing newspapers and magazines from obsolescence and bankruptcy. After decades of diminishing sales, the new technology promises to bring back profits by slashing production and distribution costs to a small fraction of their current levels. This new hope could not have come at a better time, for US dailies currently sell around 44 million copies per day, a figure reminiscent of circulation figures in the 1940s. In October, the New York Times reported that weekday sales for US papers had fallen 10% during the previous year, due to growing online readership, the recession, corporate downsizing and price increases. Even well-established local newspapers like the New York Post, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News had lost as much as 20% of their traditional readers. Over the same period, the Newspaper Association of America Advertising estimates that advertising revenue fell by 16.6% – with a further 20% drop in 2009. By contrast, online readership increased to 72 million unique visitors each month compared with 60 million just three years ago.

Portable electronic readers will undoubtedly transform the way we digest information, but whether they will deliver profits is another matter entirely. Internet readers have grown used to free information and there are strong indications that they will not give up this habit easily. A few months ago, Newsday, a Long Island newspaper recently purchased for US$650 million, tried to establish a pay wall for its online edition. Three months later, only 35 people had agreed to pay five dollars a week, US$260 a year, to subscribe to the service – a spectacularly low return on investment since the redesign of the website had cost over $4 million. Apparently undismayed by this failure, however, the New York Times is set to reintroduce a charge for primary content, a gamble that will probably determine the success of similar ventures elsewhere.

One of the few companies that seems to have worked out how to maintain a balance between its print and digital editions is the Wall Street Journal, which has bucked the general trend by raising its circulation to just over 2 million readers while attracting more than 400,000 digital subscribers (up from 100,000 just five years ago). But the Journal’s subscriber base, almost by definition, is more likely to accept the cost of digital subscriptions. Newspapers with less affluent readers are unlikely to match this. Their main hope seems to be that the new readers will accept a system of ‘micropayments’ for access to online content, paying a few cents for individual articles rather than a few dollars for the entire newspaper. Proponents of this scheme point to Apple’s success with the distribution of online music. As New York Times media columnist David Carr observed, “A simple, reliable interface for gaining access to paid content can do amazing things. Five years ago, almost no one paid for music online, and now, nine billion or so songs sold later, we know that people are willing to pay if the price is right and the convenience is there.” But Carr also warned that “If loads of quality content [is] available free elsewhere, no interface is going to make paid content attractive.”

New forms of communication have always had disruptive effects on the societies which enjoy them, but they have hardly ever destroyed the previous media. In the last hundred years, despite much doomsaying, newspapers survived the advent of radio, movies survived television, and all of these have, so far, managed to survive the Internet. In each case the old forms found ways to nest inside the new, and to evolve. There is no reason to believe that digital reading will prove any different, but until some solution is found to the impasse between paid ‘real-world’ content and free digital content, the crisis of newspaper, magazine and book publishing will continue to exact a heavy toll on companies that fail to adapt to the new environment.