Columnist: Newspapers will never die

I'd like to share Paul Carpenter's optimism, but I'm guessing Mr. Carpenter was not one of the 70 Allentown Morning Call employees or the 52 Reading Eagle employees who lost their jobs in the recent weeks.

From Carpenter's latest column about recent changes at the Morning Call and the upheaval in the newspaper industry in general:

Despite a cloud of gloom and doom hanging over the newspaper industry, there always is going to be a market for essential information, every day, provided by an establishment that is accountable, disciplined, professional and free of government control. Somebody is going to have to perform that job and I know of no one who can do it except for the kinds of people who have surrounded me since the 1960s.

I am optimistic that there will be a healthy newspaper industry when I am pushing up daisies, because such an industry is essential to a free society, although it will have a different look. (It makes no sense to chop down forests to make paper, which is as obsolete as buggy whips now that the Internet and related new products like Kindle devices are available.)

Read the full column at the newspaper's Web site.