American newspapers are fighting back. Faced with falling revenues and failing readership, they’re pitching aggressively to get Americans reading newspapers again. In a full-page ad in The New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers, a group called the “Newspaper Project” said: “More people will read a newspaper today than watched yesterday’s big game” — “big game” being a reference to last Sunday’s Super Bowl. It added: “With 100 million daily readers, newspapers are a tremendous scoring opportunity.”

“We acknowledge the challenges facing the newspaper industry in today’s rapidly changing media world,” says Donna Barrett, a member of Newspaper Project. “However, we reject the notion that newspapers — and the valuable content that newspaper journalists provide — have no future.”

The group has launched the website “to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers…. This website will be devoted to insightful articles, commentary and research that provide a more balanced perspective on what newspaper companies can do to survive and thrive in the years ahead.”

My first reaction when I read this was: Weren’t they struck by the irony of arguing for the cause of newspapers through a website? I myself think the days of newspapers are numbered, though I can’t say exactly when they will breathe their last. But if so, why should that be such a tragedy? Newspapers may go, but not so news and not so reading.

The problem really has to do more with companies than with the public. I caught a glimpse of this problem at the turn of the new century in a conference in Japan where editors of newspapers around the world complained of dwindling revenues because of competition from online news. Online news was cutting into their readership, which they could only expect to grow exponentially over the years. They themselves had their own online version out of necessity; the competition had it, so they had to have it too. The problem was that the online version did not yield ample advertising revenue, at least not yet. How long before it did, they did not know.

That is a problem, however, that has nothing to do with reading, as Newspaper Project tacitly acknowledges by maintaining a website where they can get readers to read their debates. Nor has it anything to do with the valuable content that journalists provide; the content remains just as valuable online as in print. The only difference between a newspaper and news online is the word “paper.” You can just as much read a “newspaper” in cyberspace as on pulp.

Of course, you hear arguments like there being nothing to compare with the feel and convenience of a newspaper. Like it is sheer pleasure holding a newspaper — or book — in your hands and smelling the sweet scent of fresh print. Also, you can read the newspaper in the john, you can’t read online there — unless you have a laptop, and that can get pretty messy. The same argument applies to books: You can read a book lying down, you can’t read a PC doing so.

Well, I suspect that was the same sensation felt by those who used the first books produced by Guttenberg. It was a letdown compared to the manuscripts produced by the monks, with the delicate parchments holding elaborate handwriting. Yet Guttenberg did not just revolutionize reading, he also revolutionized religion, his invention helping immensely to spread Protestantism through the publication of the Bible, the word of God thereto literally accessible only to priests. Today, books have become such a staple we cannot imagine reading without them. But we can, as books themselves proved.

As to convenience, well, Amazon has produced the Kindle, an electronic book whose screen duplicates the properties of paper. It is antiglare, which allows you to read for as long as you like. It is lighter than a book and can house thousands of books. You can buy the titles from Amazon at $10 or so and choose from hundreds of thousands of them. The only reason I don’t have it is that it’s not available outside the United States. At least you can’t order the titles because of duty restrictions, which is really the Kindle’s selling point, given its steep price ($359).

Where there’s Kindle, there’s fire. You can expect electronic books of this sort to crop up over the next few years that sell for a song, or a newspaper.

The fatal flaw lies in associating reading with a particular medium, which is print. If the digital revolution has taught anything, it is that media and content are completely independent of each other. Media are mere receptacles temporarily holding content. We used to think of songs as sound inextricably imbedded in vinyl or cassette tape or CD. Today, we think of them as just files — MP3, WMA, WAV — floating around in cyberspace, waiting to be transferred from one place to another. The same is true of the written word, or will be. They are not incantations locked in pulp, they are just text files floating around waiting to be transferred from one place to another by uploading or downloading.

It’s something to think about particularly for those advocating reading, a practice that has been pushed back over the last couple of decades with the onslaught of TV and even PCs. The PC itself, if not TV, can be used to encourage reading. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, bring Mohammed to the mountain. If reading won’t come to the younger generation via books, bring the younger generation to reading via the PC. Reading is reading, whether it’s done through the printed page or the monitor.

The newspaper will continue to have a future. But more than likely in the future, without the paper.