John McCain was right about something — he predicted that the economy was “about to crater,” and crater it did. The aggregate effect of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch had the magnitude of a meteorite and caused financial havoc unseen since the Great Depression. Perhaps that is why many of America’s landmark industries are going the way of the dinosaurs.

Layoffs and a complete lack of confidence in Wall Street have decimated the savings and spending power of middle class Americans. Industry in turn has suffered, and the Big Three American automakers have been held up as the archetype of the failing and unprofitable American business model.

Because millions of American jobs rely on the Big Three, President Obama pledged to save an industry that supports an estimated one-in-ten American jobs. It also doesn’t hurt that automobiles are American as apple pie: “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” Perhaps this symbol of America’s innovation and eminence will rebound to a stronger embodiment of its former self. The auto industry is safe — for now.

Yet not every facet of American culture has been lucky enough to receive a financial life saver from our government. An even more integral part of the very fabric of our democracy is threatened: American journalism.

For the past several years, journalists have turned introspective and lamented the decline of the paper press. Until this year, titans like The New York Times have seemed safe for at least a few more decades. But newspapers’ greatest source of revenue, advertisements, declined 15 percent last year alone, leading to a whopping 83 percent drop in the value of publicly traded newspapers. The obvious advantages of online media have long signaled troubles for print newspapers: How can a daily publication compete with a free, continuously updated and quantitatively immense body of data?

The Internet’s contribution to the global citizen’s social literacy cannot be understated. Consumers with an insatiable appetite for broad perspective can read opinions from Saudi Arabia to South Dakota. With Web 2.0, news is no longer an historical archive — it is a real time window into events unfolding across the globe. Internet based reporting offers advantages in speed, access and sheer variety to the product of any one print agency. Ironically enough, many articles lamenting the end of newspapers have appeared on the web. During the last meeting of the recently extinct Rocky Mountain News, staff members “live-blogged” the death throes of their own company! And to top it all off, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to upload a story to a website than to print and distribute millions of copies. Newspapers now cost more to print and deliver than the revenue they generate from ads and consumer purchases.

So what’s the big deal about reading the dispatches of the day off a laptop rather than a computer? The loss of tactile familiarity is not the primary concern of shifting from physical to digital media. Internally, the loss of a profitable print edition has led to financial turmoil. Newspapers’ resources used to allow them to fund foreign bureaus all over the world, as well as time-intensive investigative pieces and interviews. But although online editions are profitable, they can barely support the current newsroom staff of our country’s oldest papers. If even the most read publication switched to a solely digital format, they would experience massive layoffs. The first victim of a frugal news organization would be the time and money intensive stories that required weeks if not months to write.

But here lies perhaps the most important function of journalism: investigative reporting. In the past century, this sort of reporting has impeached a president and shown our nation the costs of war. Just in recent memory, in-depth reporting has revealed the dire state of Walter Reed, the toxicity of Chinese made toys and the corrupt influence of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In an increasingly digital world, the global economic crisis simply catalyzed a change that was a long time coming. Newspapers need to take quick action in order to remain viable. Major news organizations need to pull workers from their field offices and close their foreign bureaus. The New York Times cannot afford to have paid staff members in every place in the world, waiting for something to happen. Rather, large publications can farm local news stories out to freelance journalists, especially in nations with a free and independent press. Newspapers need to shift their resources towards in-depth reporting; after all it only takes one reporter from the AP to alert the world of a plane crash, a drought or a bank robbery. The future of a profitable news organization lies in the sale of its brand, and the irreplaceable quality of its content.