The American newspaper is dead. Long live the American newspaper! OK, so reports of the demise of daily journalism are a bit premature. But you can’t open up the newspapers today without reading bad news about the papers. Declining circulation and advertising revenues have forced newsrooms to trim their staffs, which means less real reporting. A few city papers have closed – the most recent victim was Denver’s 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News – while others fill their pages with fluff pieces or wire-service stories.

So here’s a novel idea: Let’s get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge. Remember, most professors aren’t paid for what they write now. When I publish an article in an academic journal, I don’t earn a cent. But I also don’t engage more than a handful of readers, mainly fellow specialists in my own field. It wasn’t always that way. A hundred years ago, many of the leading lights in the social sciences and the humanities wrote for the popular press. If we want to revive the press – as well as our own struggling disciplines – we might look to their example.

In my own field, history, top scholars also cultivated lay audiences: most notably, the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Mary Beard who produced bestselling textbooks alongside a broad sheaf of magazine and newspaper articles. Ditto for the new discipline of anthropology, where Franz Boas and his students – especially Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead – wrote regularly for the popular press. Today, with the press itself in peril, we need to do the same. Economists could report on the recession, of course, providing on-the-ground analyses of bank failures, housing foreclosures, and more. Biologists could cover climate change and other environmental issues, English professors could write about the book and film industries, and anthropologists could send dispatches from faraway lands.

At the professional schools, news-gathering opportunities would be even greater. Law professors could cover knotty questions before the Supreme Court. Medical school professors could describe the latest advances in patient treatment, architecture scholars could write about design, and professors of education could report on school reform. So what would be in it for them? Right now, nothing. The way you get ahead in academia is to write for other academics, period. But we can change that, too. Suppose that 30 or 40 prominent research universities issued a joint statement, urging their faculty to publish in popular

venues – and promising to consider such articles in promotion and salary decisions. Believe me, you’d see more and more professors writing for the newspaper.

Professors won’t be a panacea for newspapers, of course. Many of us don’t know how to write for lay readers, first of all, so we’ll have to learn. But we have a lot to teach, too, about nearly every subject that a paper might cover. And did I mention that we’ll work

for free? —The Christian Science Monitor