My first mentor in journalism was Llewellyn King, a stout Rhodesian who served as publisher, editor, and ace reporter for Weekly Energy Report, the Washington newsletter at which I was a summer intern. When not purring over the phone to some congressman, King would hold forth on the business side of journalism, and he also counseled me on where to look for full-time work. Once, when he mentioned the pay differentials among various news organizations, I interjected loftily that money wasn’t important. “Don’t ever say that,” King snapped, and I never did again. From such exchanges, I grasped a fact that had escaped me while I was laboring for my college paper: A newspaper is neither a public service nor a romance; it is a business. And its editorial glories are ultimately linked to and dependent upon its commercial ones.

This verity may have lingered in the background early in my career, but during the past decade, as friends and associates have fled once-thriving newsrooms rendered grim by armies of cost cutters, it has become the defining fact of the trade. Newspapers are losing their readers and advertisers; they are laying off reporters and cutting news holes. Circulation today is equal to that of 1950, when the U.S. population was half its present size. Among adults younger than 34, only one in five has the habit of daily readership that, I had once supposed, was as easy to acquire as candy and as difficult to break as heroin addiction.

Charles Madigan, a former correspondent for United Press International and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, has compiled a series of previously published articles and essays on the decline of the American newspaper business with the aim, as he writes in an eloquent introduction, of solving the mystery of what is killing the big-city paper.

The volume, pointedly titled 30 (the numeric symbol with which typewriter-pounding reporters used to end their stories), includes pieces that range from New York Times columnist David Carr’s wry look at his own family—in which the Disney Channel and Facebook are the morning amusements—to pained examinations of the troubles of such once-proud dailies as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times.

This well-chosen collection casts a light on the American press from many perspectives—those of the local daily, the august New York Times, as well as chains like Gannett. Wherever one looks, the same debate is raging. Are newspapers losing ground because they adapted to the internet too slowly? Or, by paring story lengths and dumbing down news columns in an effort to appeal to the short attention spans molded by the Web, have newspapers been, as Slate’s Jack Shafer puts it, “embracing extinction”?

The contributors to 30 are mostly traditionalists, though not rank sentimentalists. They argue that for newspapers to survive, they must offer something distinct from the synopses of the news found online; that something can only be added detail, richness, accuracy, and length. A winning journalistic product cannot be manufactured in a corporate suite. (Michael Shapiro of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism observes in 30 that Knight Ridder was enthralled by marketing surveys yet surprised when such surveys did not lead to papers with distinct editorial voices.)

The writers in this volume deplore the shallowness of newspaper content, especially lifestyle and Hollywood journalism. Eugene Roberts, the Inquirer’s fabled former executive editor, recounts to the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta the dubious pleasure of having to bend to “the fluctuations of the stock price.” Why, indeed, Auletta wonders, couldn’t shareholders make do with profit margins lower than the traditional 20 percent? Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff proposes that private billionaires would make better owners than public corporations.

As much as I sympathize with these points, we can’t ignore that younger audiences no longer want what many papers give them. The average age of newspaper readers is 56; Wolff suggests that the industry’s final hour can be forecast from an actuarial table.

While I am not quite so pessimistic, journalism’s troubles are real, and efforts to pin them on Wall Street miss the point. Nor will it wash to insist that big news budgets be maintained (by charitable foundations?) simply for the good of democracy. Journalism is never worse than when it is preachy, as when one contributor suggests that the press attempt to wean Generation Z from its liquid-crystal displays so it will take to reading. Media historian David Mindich advocates that the government work harder to churn out news—now there’s a lively-sounding beat—so that papers have more to say.

All of this elicits the sentimentalist in me. H.L. Mencken, one of America’s most famous newspapermen, opted for reporting over attending college in 1898 because, he claimed, the prospect of listening to professors paled in comparison to that of speeding to fires and whorehouse raids. Much later, a renowned editor banned carpeting in the newsroom in the belief that noise fostered creative—maybe he meant competitive—juices. The point of such anecdotes is that newspapers thrived in the 20th century because of their connection to the community—a bond that was organic, not contrived. Democracy benefited, but only incidentally. Society’s interests were served as much by the Darwinian competition for readers as by the presence of do-gooders in the newsroom. And that competition was decided by circulation, advertising heft, and, yes, profitability.

Back then, newspapers sold a uniquely valuable package, but thanks to the internet’s success in unbundling content—news from weather, sports from stocks—that package is no longer needed. Even the revered New York Times pays a heavy price for its superior content: profit margins that rank among the industry’s lowest.

The question is not who will own papers, but what will be in them and whether they will continue to attract readers. It would be a grave mistake to think that the bottom line can be ignored or that journalism can lean on the patronizing elbow of philanthropy and still be relevant. Profitability is hardly a guarantee of quality, but over the long term, it is the gauge of an audience’s interest—without which journalists might as well abandon Mencken for a university desk and sterile tears.