Paul Starr, author of an important comparative study of how mass media developed in the U.S. and in Europe, has weighed in on two much-discussed issues: the seemingly inevitable decline of the print newspaper and how that decline may weaken democratic institutions.

It’s a long article, but worth an investment of time. Among Starr’s salient points:

1. With the rise of the internet, advertisers need no longer piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales. Newspapers, in turn, are less able to use classified advertisements and other profit centers to subsidize expensive foreign and other news coverage, investigate official malfeasance and produce public-service journalism.

2. The internet enables a far richer constellation of voices but also fragments the audience. Where readers of diverse interests and political beliefs once read the same newspaper (in recent decades, the U.S. newspaper market has approximated a number of local or regional near-monopolies) the internet allows readers more easily to sample only those materials that address directly their interests: Politico for politics junkies; PerezHilton for celebrity gossip fans. What are the consequences for democracy if some citizens grow more deeply informed about world affairs but others, greater in number, focus their attention on, say, Lindsay Lohan?

3. Similarly, a more specialized media easily can become a more partisan one as readers follow only those sources they personally sympathize or agree with. Will readers who consume media that affirm rather than challenge their beliefs make the many compromises that democracy requires?

Starr quotes the great 20th century American political commentator Walter Lippmann, who called the daily paper “the bible of democracy,” and he fears the newspaper’s demise (“the metropolitan daily may be a peculiar historical invention whose time is passing”) will shake democratic institutions. A 2003 study, he notes, established a strong association between low newspaper circulation and high political corruption. Perhaps, Starr concludes, philanthropic institutions might step up to subsidize the daily rag.

Others disagree. Jack Shafer lays out some of the contrary arguments. What do you think? Does the ready availability of online news, blogs, and the like fill the gap? Is Starr too fearful? Or possibly we are in a time of transition, and new models of information distribution have not yet emerged?