InsaneJournal

Kathleen Parker blamed the newspaper industry's decline in part on the MySpace generation, which is too absorbed playing the "The Sims," "World of Warcraft" and Second Life to care about the real world ["Frayed Thread of a Free Society," op-ed, March 15].

So all those high school and college students who campaigned and voted for Barack Obama last summer were just a fluke, huh?

I'll admit, I'm probably one of the few kids at my high school who doesn't just read the sports and comics pages. But Time magazine reported Feb. 5 that demand for news content, especially among young people, is higher than ever. They're just getting it free online instead of paying for a printed paper. The problem facing newspapers is that my generation doesn't want to pay for news content.

Rather than blaming society's problems on youth (a practice as old as humanity itself), newspapers could learn a thing or two from Apple. People thought illegal downloading would mean the end of the music industry. iTunes proved them wrong.

More people would pay for news content online if all it took was a few cents and one button click.

EMMA FURTH

Bethesda

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Thanks to Kathleen Parker for her scary wake-up call. She asked, "How does the newspaper industry survive in a climate in which the public doesn't know what it doesn't know? Or what it needs ?" This reminded me of the words of the American satirist Artemus Ward when he wrote, "It isn't what people don't know that's so dangerous as what they think they know that 'tain't so."

That just 27 percent of Americans born since 1977 read a newspaper the day before -- as reported by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press -- was truly shocking.

I don't have the answers, but this situation is worthy of heavy-duty study because a free, independent press is the very lifeblood of a democracy.

FRANK RIDGE

Reston