The relevance of the Dead Tree Media is at the forefront of a lot of thought and talk right now. Yesterday's move into bankruptcy protection by the Chicago Tribune, along with the ongoing struggles of daily papers to make a dime, leads many folks to predict that soon we won't have daily papers at all. A few national papers will keep on—though the New York Times isn't exactly sitting pretty either—and everything else will be online, or in more specialized weekly or monthly publications whose modest budgets and niche appeal will ensure survival.

A few problems with that model: without the daily papers to link to, what will bloggers do? I read a dozen or fifteen blogs daily (along with three papers) and I'd say that at least fifty percent of all links in online sources are to daily papers—I just did two myself, with more to come. The other fifty percent include links to other blogs, which of course also link to the dailies. Without the dailies to provide raw news material to tout or disagree with or analyze, blogging will become more narcissistic and navel-gazing than it already is.

Can dailies switch their investigative, reporting and editorializing functions entirely to the web? Perhaps, but this will require a leap of imagination that lots of newsroom cultures will be unable to imagine, much less attempt.

Meanwhile, the continued relevance of dailies appears today here in Chicago, where one of the crimes Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is now accused of by the Feds is threatening the Chicago Tribune. If they didn't fire editorial board members who attacked him, he menaced, he would withhold state help in the sale of Wrigley Field.

And one structural reason why I think freelance, amateur blogging cannot replace daily newspaper journalism has to do with the culture of investigative reporting. In Chicago, teams of reporters at both newspapers get paid well to spend long days and weeks and months poring through public records, developing sources, and interviewing people, to expose civic corruption. Sometimes stories take years to develop fully. The culture of the press as it currently exists, for all its cronyism and blindness, is invaluable in any big city. And whatever energy bloggers bring to that mix, it's not as deep or as sustained as you have at daily papers where editors want to hang politicians scalps on their walls.

So, will daily papers become civic institutions, supported like symphonies or the ballet by rich subscribers and city subsidies? Or will they simply continue the slide to extinction?

The only prediction I'd make is that however this shakes out, it won't be something very many people saw coming. Ten years ago, no one imagined the blogosphere. Ten years from now, we may still be staining our hands with newsprint every morning, but the paper might be free. Or a local edition of a national paper (just let the NYT cover the world, we'll take care of local business. . . )(This is sort of what the Seattle papers already do, by re-running day-old NYT columnists). Or entirely online for free, with fees to print the crossword puzzle. I'd pay. But I already do.

In my own reading life, I've watched Chicago go from a four newspaper town (with more than one edition of each paper per day: I used to get the "early" edition of the next day's paper as recently as the early 1980s) to a two newspaper town. Ten years ago, no one saw Craigslist coming, and no one knows what will come next. But with the current economic crisis, the newspaper business is going to have to get creative fast.