Today’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Rick Henderson, managing editor of Carolina Journal.

So what’s going to happen to the American newspaper? I can’t count how many times I have been asked and have tried to answer that question since early December. That’s when the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where I worked as an editorial writer for the past three years, was put up for sale.

The short answer is, “go out of business,” which the Rocky did in late February, roughly seven weeks shy of its 150th anniversary. And it’s one of many big-city dailies that are in a financial freefall. The Internet has both allowed news junkies to bypass print dailies and obliterated newspapers’ business model, thanks to online advertising alternatives led by Craigslist and Yahoo.

The Newspaper Association of America reports ad revenues nationwide plunged by 17.7 percent in 2008. Ad dollars are down roughly a third, or about $13 billion, since 2005. That money’s not coming back, even when the economy recovers.

Paid circulation is plummeting as subscribers age. And their kids aren’t reading print newspapers.

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that a mere 15 percent of Americans born after 1965 read print editions of dailies, compared with 28 percent of Boomers and 48 percent of those born in 1946 and before.

If readers fully migrate online, they won’t restore newspapers’ fiscal health, because the rate structure for Web ads delivers only a fraction of the revenues that the old system provided.

But many of my questioners were more concerned about the access to information on the workings of government agencies and public officials they’d lose if the paper stopped publishing, or more likely, continued to shrink and the “news hole” kept getting smaller.

I don’t have a pithy response. But I’m not as gloomy about journalism as I was in the Rocky’s final days.

Us ex-newsies are prone to wringing our hands and waxing nostalgically about the wonderful public service newspapers provided in their glory days … and then conveniently forgetting how often mainstream dailies have succumbed to bias and agenda-driven reporting.

As my connections to a daily newsroom recede, I’ve become less willing to give newspapers a pass when they fail in their most basic role as a public watchdog. Yes, newspapers pay people to attend and report on mind-numbing but important city council meetings, land-use hearings, and legislative sessions. Most of us won’t do that on our own time unless we have a personal interest — if our neighborhood faces forced annexation, for instance.

Still, any regular reader of Carolina Journal can point out the dozens of stories, large and small, about official malfeasance right here in North Carolina the MSM have missed. Failing to keep an eye on spending and regulation, politicians, and bureaucrats has undermined media credibility.

Providing readers with incomplete information can be just as harmful as publishing outright falsehoods. The traditional newspaper may be dying, and yet the public’s appetite for information about the inner workings of government has in no way diminished.

Blogs and other alternative media cannot maintain the sheer volume of reporting about public institutions that dailies once provided. With fewer boots on the ground, and fewer reporters with sources and contacts, less information will see the light of day.

What is possible, however, is journalism that takes on the job the MSM has often abandoned, giving a better understanding of how public institutions work. A lot of that information and analysis can emerge from nontraditional outlets, including niche publications, citizen journalists, and even organizations with an ax to grind, including us.

The publications and media outlets that survive in this new world will have to do so by building reputations based on the quality of the work they produce, instead of the barrels of ink they purchase.

They will live or die if they serve their readers.

That’s the way the free market’s supposed to work.