Turning into nonprofits is not a solution for the media’s woes.

The financial problems of the newspaper business have produced all manner of hand-wringing about the danger to democracy allegedly inherent in the alleged fall of the Fourth Estate. I certainly don't argue with the proposition that good journalism is important to society—on the contrary. But the solution du jour—that newspapers should be run as nonprofit organizations—strikes me as a cop-out. We're only in the early innings of figuring out how new business models might replace the industrial-age structures of traditional newspapers, and we're already throwing in the towel. Warren Buffett has a few extra billion, so there's an easy fix!

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, two portfolio managers from Yale, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, argue that newspapers should be organized like universities, with nonprofit status and large endowments. They set up their point with what, for money guys, should be an obvious fallacy: equating the current fiscal problems of debt-laden newspaper companies with the overall health of the news industry. The daily newspaper business certainly has existential problems, but statements like "average profit margins at The Washington Post over the past five years have been about 25 percent less than what they had been in the previous 15 years" mean very little in themselves.

As do statements like "news organizations have cut costs, with grave consequences." The only grave consequences cited are staff cuts at big newspapers and that the number of foreign correspondents at U.S. newspapers has fallen significantly. But why would the quality or quantity of reportage from overseas be measured by the number of full-time overseas correspondents employed by American newspapers? Frankly, access to quality foreign coverage has, by any measure, increased dramatically in recent years, thanks to the Internet.

They go on to state flatly that "advertising revenues that newspaper Web sites generate are not enough to sustain robust news coverage." That might be true at the moment, but what does that mean? Has any newspaper actually made the Web enough of a priority to even test that proposition fully? And how is "robust" defined anyway? To begin with, outside of New York and Washington and a few other big cities, it doesn't describe the newsgathering efforts of most daily newspapers.

So the model they are proposing is ...Yale. Now, as a Wesleyan graduate, I have my biases against Yale, but, that aside, it's almost funny to read that "just as endowed educational institutions charge tuition, endowed newspapers would generate incremental revenues from hard-copy sales and online subscriptions." At Yale (and Wesleyan) that "incremental revenue" runs about $50,000 per student per year, which the institution can charge because it is perceived as a sure ticket to the upper class. Elite universities with big endowments controlled by boards of directors of the said-same upper class—that hardly seems the model for the scrappy watchdogs of democracy.

Steve Coll of The New Yorker, whose work I generally admire, endorses the Swensen/ Schmidt approach, with some added nonsense of his own. He takes as a given the premise that the (pre-Internet) newsroom structures of the past half-century are the best possible structures for all time. He also laments the decline of the foreign bureau—a lament I'd wager is shared mainly by other former foreign-bureau correspondents.