I once wrote a freelance article titled “How the newspaper can win over the next generation” that ran on the opinion pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — a 149-year-old daily. Two months later, in a stroke of irony, the Seattle P-I announced its decision to continue as an online-only operation, citing recent perennial losses.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, daily circulation of U.S. newspapers has declined since 1987, facing mounting competition for reader attention and advertising from cable news and the internet. While newspapers that also operate online have garnered readership, ad revenues continue to plunge.

As the market for print journalism continues to shrink, papers are catering to the public’s seemingly infinite appetite for sensationalism and muckraking. This past weekend, News of the World, a 168-year-old British tabloid, ceased publication due to a series of phone hacking scandals. The most serious revelation involves an alleged hacking of a phone belonging to teen murder victim Milly Dowler that enflamed public outrage and catalyzed the newspaper’s demise.

This type of willingness to indulge in sensationalism has also expanded beyond tabloids to reputable papers. For example, The Daily Telegraph, a reputable British newspaper, admitted paying £110,000 for leaked data concerning the expenses of a member of Parliament, breaking the journalistic code of not paying for sources. In a more recent case following the outbreak of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, The New York Times published multiple opinion pieces professing sympathy for all housemaids and, specifically, the “traumatized chambermaid” — all but declaring Strauss-Kahn guilty. Newspapers’ tenuous but fierce grip on their own survival has led to an increasing willingness to accommodate the public’s voyeuristic desire for sensationalism, and, in turn, distorts the significance — or rather, the insignificance — of people and events. By lowering their standards to appeal to the greatest possible readership, newspapers are dragging journalism down. If the maintenance of the newspaper industry is truly untenable, perhaps we should at least attempt to save journalism by reconstructing journalistic integrity — once developed by and associated with newspapers — within the internet. Currently, the majority of online news organizations are aggregators, offering little more than summaries or commentaries on the articles from other established, usually print, publications. Still, hope is emerging from true online-only “papers” without hard-copy connections, such as the aforementioned Seattle P-I. Especially with the growing popularity of e-reader devices like the Amazon Kindle, online newspapers will be able to eliminate printing and distribution costs while maintaining the standards of quality reporting. While current numbers are sparse, these news organizations are paving the path for original, in-depth investigative journalism in a brand new media while retaining the code of newspaper ethics.

On the other hand, through the internet, the standard of journalism may change altogether. A strong contender for this paradigm shift is “citizen media,” in which the members of the public play “an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to a 2003 report by the American Press Institute. The popularity of “citizen media” is evident through the influx of blogs, chatrooms, wikis and open news sites, such as OhMyNews International. But while advocates of citizen journalism — like We Media, an organization commissioned by the American Press Institute -— claim that it will encourage “independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires,” critics, such as the editors of The New York Times, have accused proponents of abandoning journalism’s traditional goals of objectivity and ethical reporting, citing citizen media’s lack of structural accountability.

Print journalism may be stooping to new lows, but the future of the newspaper industry remains grim as new media continues to usurp its boundaries. The future of journalism, on the other hand, may still be salvaged through a new business model and/or paradigm. The question is no longer “How can newspapers win over the next generation?” but rather, “How can journalism survive in this generation?”