By Wally DuChateau

I start each and every morning with the same habitual routine: a cup of black coffee and The Seattle Times. On Wednesdays, I also read this newspaper because I enjoy the humor and nonsense in “Wally’s World.” (I have, by the way, recently discovered and can recommend a very mild, flavorful, East Coast coffee that isn’t available around here but, if my recommendation means anything to you, can be ordered at Hamptoncoffee.com.)

Today, many nerds and geeks and high-tech execs are predicting the imminent demise of printed newspapers. They say the daily news is readily and more currently available online, which is surely true, but they fail to point out most of the online news invariably comes from newspapers. Yet, the newspapers aren’t compensated for this service. In other words, the online titans reap all the financial benefit of newspaper news, especially in-depth investigative reporting from all over the world, but they invest relatively little time, energy and money to get it.

To combat this disturbing scenario, newspapers have also gone online, becoming hybrids of sorts. Of course, that’s true of this weekly tabloid as well. Its online version is a bit fractured and scattered and not all the editorial page is up to date, so I’d much rather read it on paper.

Newspapers make their money from advertising. A recent Nielsen public poll indicates that the shopping habits of 82 percent of the U.S. population are influenced to some degree, however feeble, by newspaper advertisements. That’s a significant figure. As long as the public’s buying patterns are so greatly influenced by newspaper ads, you can be certain newspapers aren’t about to disappear from the cultural landscape quite as quickly as the high-tech procrastinators maintain. (Most people, myself included, look upon online advertisements as a pain in the butt and zap them as soon as they appear, which causes one to question how many Web sites are able to remain solvent.)

Unfortunately, many newspapers have solved their financial problems by selling themselves to huge, international corporations that know nothing about the newspaper business. For example, the Los Angeles Times, which has the second-largest circulation of any newspaper in the U.S., was recently sold to Chicago mogul Samuel Zell, head of Tribune Inc., who has flatly stated he has absolutely no interest in the newspaper business. This is a rotten situation. Gigantic corporations own too much of the U.S. media. They influence – even control – too much of what we watch and read. Make no mistake about it, if one or two behemoth hedge funds ever owned all the American newspapers, they could virtually dictate not only everything the public reads, but what we see on TV and in movies as well.

As you may know, The Courier Herald was sold to Sound Publishing, a conglomeration of small newspapers from around the Puget Sound region. I was disappointed when this happened but, I’m happy to report, none of the possible, negative consequences I imagined have materialized. I would, however, be quite upset if Sound Publishing was sold to Boeing. (That speculation isn’t entirely facetious; at least it’s no crazier than General Electric owning NBC – which it does.)

But even if G.E. and Boeing end up owing half the world, the situation would still be tolerable as long as nobody censored the brilliant ramblings of “Wally’s World.”