Digital media is here to stay. There's no question that technology – and consequently economics – have already made printed journalism a dinosaur that mostly exists to service a shrinking market driven by increasingly uncommon habitual preferences, and perhaps a bit of nostalgia. The industry seems to be in agreement that printed products will be little more than a niche in just a few years.

Think about it; if someone were to show up from another planet and were given an Ipad, on which they were taught to access everything from the morning newspaper to Wikipedia, to the latest edition of Rolling Stone, not to mention sites like Living Social and Groupon, they might be a little surprised were we to tell them that we also slice up our trees into ultra-thin sheets to print the same information on them before transporting the dead tree slices, non-digitally, in giant fossil-fuel powered vehicles. It would probably seem like an epic waste of dwindling, non-renewable resources for an extinct purpose.

So while it shouldn't be a surprise that print media products are slowly starting to take the big plunge, there are several red flags being raised as they do. In early June, Staten Island-based Advance Publications (the 46th largest corporation in the entire U.S. according to Forbes) announced that it would be shrinking one of its subsidiaries, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, to a three-day a week publication with a ”greater emphasis on digital content.“ It also shouldn't be a surprise that a digital publication would require less employees because of the simplified logistics of digital compared to print.

What was surprising, was the announcement that they would be halving their newsroom, laying off 84 employees on that side alone. The 176-year old publication will undoubtedly become something much less than New Orleans' watchdog, known for its gritty investigative coverage of a city that has been forever mired in corruption. In truth, there might not be a single American city that needs a true daily newspaper as much as New Orleans, yet they will become the largest city in the United States without one.

Like most major newspapers, the Times-Picayune is a subsidiary of a large conglomerate. Ever since the FCC severely deregulated media consolidation rules, more and more outlets of all types are owned by less and less companies. This not only puts a tremendous amount of public influence into a smaller number of hands, who as a result of owning companies across multiple industries now have a growing number of potential conflicts of interest, but it also incentivizes cuts like those at the Times-Picayune.

Digital media has made it easier to consolidate – and as a result homogenize – the news market, just as much as it has any other media platform from movies to television to radio. If I own 20 newspapers, and especially if I own 200, I can cut overhead by using as much shared content as possible and keeping only a skeleton staff of local reporters to cover the things that don't come off of the wire. Syndicating a handful of opinion columnists, arts and entertainment and sports writers, then filling out the rest with reports from AP or UPI and a sprinkling of local fare does not a newspaper make.

But that seems to be the direction in which the corporate owners are taking the product. As a result, the emphasis becomes less about being a coherent and useful news source, and more about publishing whatever can draw the most views on the cheap. Publications rush to shout into the echo chamber first, hoping that theirs will be the coverage that manages to go viral on Facebook and Twitter. The result is an underemphasis on quality or accuracy and on overemphasis on page requests and unique visits, as demonstrated most recently by several major news publications reporting inaccurately on this week's Supreme Court healthcare ruling.

It also tempts editors and publishers to blur the line between informing the public and entertaining them. You'll get more clicks for Octomom or some idiot threatening to burn a Koran in front of 30 people he calls a congregation, than you will on a major conflict of interest in a city contract, but only one of them is newsworthy in the traditional sense. You'll get more clicks on a shooting or a pet story than you will profiling to candidates for an obscure yet important public office, but real newspapers still believe in providing important information as a matter of social responsibility.

As newspapers are increasingly owned and operated by corporations with their executives and boards, rather than families deeply rooted in the community they serve, the pride in quality and integrity of the product is quickly evaporating. Things like real investigative reporting – the kind that exposed everything from Watergate to the Gulf of Tonkin to countless municipal scandals that would have otherwise remained unknown – are too often considered bad ROI because they can't be done by an inexperienced cub reporter with a cell phone and an internet connection. Corporate execs a thousand miles away have little appetite for seasoned professionals spending six months on an investigation that may of may not yield content, when the industry has increasingly become a factory to do little more than churn content endlessly.

Ironically, I'm a columnist and editor for an online newspaper, though The Bradenton Times was originated as a hyper-local digital product in response to the decreasing local coverage in other publications, as they continued to suffer massive cutbacks and layoffs at the hands of their parent companies. In today's digital market, there's not yet a revenue model for doing a full-fledged print-scale style publication on a digital platform. Other ”transitioning“ publications like the The Grand Rapids Press (also shrunk to three days weekly) and the 174-year old Ann Arbor News, which Advance also owns and took purely digital in 2009, have all become something less than they once were in terms of scope and scale.

Some people might say that digital news has rendered the local publication obsolete, that they can get everything they need glancing at their Iphone and nothing is lost. But I increasingly encounter individuals who spend a lot of time surfing such devices, yet come away with very little actual information. It seems everyone who's plugged into the grid gets the same handful of stories from the echo chamber, over and over. They've all seen images of Tropical Storm Debbie this week, heard about wildfires in Colorado and saw something about an attorney general held in contempt, and the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the healthcare mandate. But even highly intelligent, college-educated people usually surprise me with how little depth of knowledge they obtain in the process, as none of them seem nearly as in tune with their society as even the high school drop outs who read two papers a day in the age before Apple.

Anyone who claims that they know how the news media will look in five years better have a crystal ball, and it's worth noting that television was viewed by many as a vastly inferior product with little chance of competing with print when it first emerged. We just might see the day when newspapers enjoy a digital rebirth, even more capable of doing what they do best. But the day we start believing that a free and independent press is a quaint and outdated notion, or that freedom can be preserved without a network of skilled and experienced journalists shining a light in the dark places where tyranny and fascism lurk, we will be taking the first steps on a road to ruin.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised... or Printed... or Mentioned on the Radio