Sounds kinda desperate to me

Roy Peter Clark's Catholic guilt trip on newspapers -- Your duty to read the paper -- has sparked an interesting passel of comments on the Poynter site.
I tend to agree with this fellow, Svend Holst, new media manager of The Wenatchee World:

"... This continuing resistance to change in our industry is frustrating. Frustrating because it's this sort of resistance to change that will, and is, killing the bottom line of newspapers across the country.

Seems to me that it would be more important to the future of journalism would be for journalists to read newspaper Web sites to get a better feel for how to tell their stories better with the more sophisticated tools at their fingertips with digital publication. If newspaper Web sites deliver the news better than other sources, more people will read them and more revenue will be handy to pay for excellent reporters and editors.

Can newspaper Web sites produce the same revenue as print advertising now? No. Is the print-centric newspaper industry putting as much energy into online revenue as they are toward print revenue? No. Are some newspapers moving in that direction? Yes. Are they finding success? Yes. The revenue will be there, but as we focus on preserving the use of trees to tell stories and sell advertising, we're failing to position ourselves to compete for it. Our sales folks (generally, industry-wide) sell print first and throw in online ads as an afterthought.Chaining journalism to any medium shows a lack of understanding of how information is digested and shared by the public (including journalists) now. It's not the future that is growing beyond newsprint, it's the present. Print/paperless ... Need to move past this stuff."