Maybe David Simon has rendered a correct diagnosis of the newspaper industry’s current condition: Unchecked Wall Street greed, compounded by the media’s failure to persuade readers to actually pay for the journalism they seem to think should be as free as the air.

But (to continue to borrow his metaphor), Simon’s remedy seems like weak medicine.

Simon’s testimony Thursday before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the “Future of Journalism” had moments that held me in swoon: “[R]eaders acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin — namely the newspapers themselves.” Anyone with even a little ink in his veins must have felt a tinge of righteous agreement. Can we get an amen? Or at least a little love for the reporters who make it possible for Google to be so awesome?

(Let’s set aside the whole question of why the Senate, which is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment to meddle with the press, is even holding hearings on the future of journalism. Frankly, the less time Congress spends deliberating it, the better, IMO.)

But the more I listened to Simon, (thanks, KRCC), and the more he tossed around the notion that “high-end journalism” is endangered, the more he sounded like someone who feels entitled:

I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.

The idea of this is absurd, yet to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don’t know what they don’t know — which is a dangerous state for any class of folk — and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere.

I began to get the sensation that Simon was stuck on the island, waving frantically as my life raft began to drift away. As far as I am concerned, he disappeared from view completely as he closed in on the conclusion of his remarks:

[I]t is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper.

Hubris, anyone?

There are good economic reasons why journalism, which does not require a license to practice, nonetheless became professionalized in the 20th century: the tools necessary to do the job — mass publishing and broadcasting — were so bloody expensive. A community had no choice but to give the job of covering their local institutions to a relatively few people, who helped keep that trust by enforcing professional standards: accuracy, veracity, independence.

Citizens didn’t give the job of covering the community to journalists because citizens were unwilling or too stupid to demand accountability on their own; they did it because it was the only way they could get the job done. The prohibitive costs of one-to-many communication didn’t permit any other effective way.

Those costs have, for all intents and purposes, vanished. And with them has vanished the absolute need for a community to assign all of journalism’s responsibilities to trained journalists.

Simon is right that much of the work of journalism is unrelated to the cost of distribution. It takes time, and therefore money, to constantly watch local government, to attend meetings, read documents, meet with sources, make phone calls — to say nothing of the time it takes to actually sit at the keyboard and write. Until the cost of doing that job vanishes as the cost of distribution has vanished, there remains an economic reason to put much of the job of reporting into the hands of trained specialists.

But, not only in the hands of trained specialists. The circle of participation has widened, and journalists must make room for others in an enlarged ecosystem of news. It’s not either-or. It’s both-and. It’s not shut up and read your paper. It’s how can we help you?

At this hour, many residents of Falcon School District 49 are mounting a recall election against their board of education. Their ire was sparked not only by Gazette news coverage of the board, but by information that many residents received directly from the school and then began circulating among themselves, without the newspaper’s help. There is a web site for the recall movement. The Gazette, to be sure, has done its share of reporting, and I’ve even created a discussion forum to keep D-49 residents up to date on the Gazette’s battles with the board over public documents and open meetings.

This is still journalism. It is still vitally important to at least some residents of District 49. But it is journalism in partnership with the community. Equipped with cheap distribution tools, D-49 residents have joined the circle. The Gazette no longer commands the center of the discussion. We either collaborate with the community — representing all sides of the debate, and with our dedication to truth, veracity and independence intact — or we will be pushed aside.

I don’t suspect D-49 parents care whether “high-end journalism” is at work here. Really, it’s not journalism they want, anyway. It’s school-board accountability they want, whether journalism helps them get it or not. If the participants in the current D-49 drama come away from events satisifed that, win or lose, they got accountability from their school board, the journalism will have been as high-end as it needed to be. And I don’t believe for a second that anyone who gets personally involved, who signs a petition, or posts an item on the recall website, or marches to yet another endless school board meeting, will wish they could have been spared the trouble and that the newspaper would have taken care of things for them.

The cause is not journalism. The cause is a free society, able to get the information it needs to remain free. The rest is just method.

So I guess I wasn’t surprised to hear Simon argue that journalism’s big misstep was failing to make itself so valuable to people that they would pay for it, and that salvation (if it’s not too late to achieve it) lies in forcing people to pay to read news online. Publishers, he testified, missed their opportunity to cement journalism’s rightful place at the top of the information food chain in the 1970s, when profits were fat and Wall Street marched in to skim much of it off. When the Internet came along, too many reporters and editors already had been laid off to create journalism so compelling that readers would pay to get it online.

Simon has a solid foundation on which to make this argument:

It costs money to do the finest kind of journalism. And how anyone can believe that the industry can fund that kind of expense by giving its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me. A freshman marketing major at any community college can tell you that if you don’t have a product for which you can charge people, you don’t actually have a product.

But the question isn’t whether journalism has value. Of course it does, and there isn’t a freeloading blogger who doesn’t know it. Simon’s foundational argument isn’t wrong; it’s just irrelevant.

The truth is, citizens have never paid for journalism — or at least, not for all of it, not even during the salad days before newsroom cutbacks began. Ninety cents of every dollar of journalism has always been subsidized by advertisers. I haven’t heard any evidence yet that folks would, without complaint, pick up the costs that advertisers have been covering all these decades.

If readers won’t pay that cost, Simon argues that turning newspapers into nonprofits, living off donations, grants and endowments, is the most promising alternative. Whole other discussion.

My ego wishes Simon were right. My head tells me otherwise.