The question has been very much on my mind this week: How do you fund newspapers to make them viable?

The reason, I hope, is understandable, given that the Rocky's fate is hanging in the balance. If no buyer is found, the paper very well may close soon, almost 150 years after it was founded.

Some very smart people argued in national publications this week that the solution to newspapers' financial crisis is to turn them into "nonprofit, endowed institutions - like colleges and universities."

I wish I believed they were right. It sounds so good, so comforting.

The chief investment officer at Yale and one of his financial analysts wrote on the op-ed page of The New York Times: "If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved."

But in Jefferson's time, there was no journalistic medium to rival newspapers. They were the press. That's not true today. Despite what some may think of it, television is the principal source of news for many. And that's not all bad. In Denver, we're lucky to have a slew of good TV investigative reporters. And the Web, well, it offers a plethora of choices, whatever you may think of the quality of some of them. Remember, in Jefferson's day, many thought little of their newspapers, too.

On the Web site of The New Yorker, Steve Coll, former managing editor of The Washington Post and an accomplished author, published a similar piece.

"In the foreseeable future," he wrote, "it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers - those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so."

The Rocky and The Denver Post are the latter.

Coll acknowledges the vitality of the digital revolution - the Web - but argues that "there is just no substitute for the professional, civil-service- style, relentless independent thinking, reporting and observation that developed in big newsrooms between the Second World War and whenever it was that the end began - about 2005 or so."

Is he right?

First, I don't think the question should be how to save newspapers in the form these writers admire. The question should be how to save the type of journalism they, and I, admire: independent, verifiable reporting on subjects of public importance. We don't necessarily need newspapers to do that. Does anybody seriously believe that 60 Minutes or Ted Koppel's Nightline or other documentary programs haven't produced work that compares favorably with the efforts of America's major newspapers?

Second, even the national newspapers these writers treasure do far more than inform their citizenry with serious reporting on public affairs. That's just a part of what they do. I can tell you from experience that the comics are far and away the section of newspapers that many readers feel most passionate about. Coll's Washington Post publishes comics. Are we going to have nonprofits publishing the funny pages? Members of the public getting tax breaks for donating to keep Garfield alive? If we want to be so high-minded to create nonprofits for public service journalism, we'd have to exclude not only comics but also sports, entertainment, cooking, lifestyles, gossip, horoscopes, puzzles and all the other stuff that readers love but has nothing to do with Jefferson's ideals.

We're a country that values freedom and independence. Invariably, by going the nonprofit route, newspapers would become more beholden to government and more subject to regulation. The Yale authors acknowledge as much but say the sacrifice of certain aspects of what we do is a worthwhile tradeoff.

My experience as an editor has taught me that it's true that necessity is the mother of invention. Journalists are driven to excel, in part, by the demands of their job. Uncertainty is not necessarily an enemy of excellence. In fact, I've found that high-achieving journalists typically thrive on uncertainty. They find better ways of doing their work because they're forced to.

Personally, I'm more intrigued by solutions to newspapers' plight that expand the information available to communities. A French journalist based in New York, Jeff Mignon (a friend), argued on his blog, media cafe, that perhaps a new model for news organizations can be found in French local daily newspapers, where he says 70 percent to 80 percent of the content is written by amateur "correspondents."

"Imagining a media where the content is, for a big chunk, written by non-journalists is not a fantasy. It already exists and it has been working for years. Pro and 'am' can live together and produce a quality medium."

On average, he wrote, there are 10 correspondents for one journalist.

This kind of creative approach stems, in my view, from the need to find an efficient economic model, one where the most serious work is given to trained journalists but where much else of what is valuable to readers is produced at a lower cost.

I'd prefer to see us look for new models like this than try to preserve ones that once worked. Inevitably, if we take the latter route, innovation will pass us by.

In talking to people about the current storm swamping newspapers, I often compare it to a 100-year flood. Everything in the waters' path gets wiped out, with the occasional survivor tossed to safety. Much is lost. But when the waters subside, new life always begins.

That will happen with newspapers, too. It is happening. It sometimes can be difficult to recognize. But it's there. And as it grows, a new world will take shape.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.