FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- When I told friends that my wife and I were moving to Fairbanks for a year and that I would be teaching journalism at the university, several asked how I could teach about an industry that is dying and why any student would want to learn about it.

I talked about those questions and the future of newspapers last week in a speech to about 50 people in downtown Fairbanks. I called my talk, "Hold the Obit: Newspapers Aren't Dead!" and explained why I am optimistic about the future of the industry in which I worked for more than 40 years.

The doubts are reasonable. Newspapers have been failing. Some have closed, some are in bankruptcy court, and others have been sold at fire-sale prices.

The steady stream of buyouts, layoffs and cuts has been painful; many of my friends in the industry are out of work. Those who still have jobs agonize about how to provide decent news coverage with smaller staffs.

Numbers explain the ugly necessity to take steps editors deplore.

Nationally, newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 percent in the last two years. Classified ads have migrated to Craigslist.

As newspapers seem to be wasting away, the Internet soars; traffic to news Web sites continues to grow. Newspapers provide much of the news content you find online -- especially local news. That's easy to understand. Despite the cuts, in every community, the newspaper still has the largest and most professional staff of reporters and editors.

Early on it was assumed that sooner or later advertising revenue from the Internet would grow to offset much of the cost of reporting the news but that has not happened. Advertising on news Web sites is far from the level required to support newsgathering.

There is no reason to expect that to change.

These dismal trends lead many to think the newspaper industry is dying.

I do not agree.

The newspaper industry is not dying; it's changing.

I think newspapers will emerge from the current economic chaos prepared to adapt to the Internet world.

I hope I'm right -- and you should, too -- because democracy requires a vigorous press, and even in this Internet age, that means newspapers.

Newspapers lead the fight for open government.

That was certainly true for my years as executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel.

We fought when a judge ordered the paper not to print news about a court hearing.

We used open records laws to get records about suicides at the local jail.

I went to city and town meetings to demand access for reporters and for the public.

We printed editorials when officials tried to govern in secret.

That's the kind of thing newspapers do -- they confront the powerful, dig out important information, and present it to readers.

While there are some interesting examples of local reporting by bloggers there is no significant Internet model to replace the kind of reporting newspapers provide.

That's no surprise; it takes an experienced reporter to pour through city, town and state budgets and make sense of them for readers, to attend enough council meetings to understand what's really going on, to ask intelligent questions of officials and to know when the answers just don't ring true.

And then there is investigative reporting -- one of the most vital functions good newspapers provide.

The problems facing the newspaper industry today stem from economic assumptions that are no longer true.

Phil Meyers, a respected journalist, teacher and author, commented on those assumptions in an article nearly 15 years ago when he compared newspapers to the goose that laid golden eggs.

He said buyers assumed the goose would continue to lay one golden egg per day -- and they paid a lot of money for the goose. When the goose dropped production to one golden egg per week, the buyers went broke and were forced to sell the goose for a lot less than they paid for it. But the new owners were happy because they didn't expect a golden egg every day.

Substitute "newspaper" for "goose" and you have the story.

Papers deep in debt are failing or being sold at reasonable prices to new owners prepared to accept lower profit levels. Not 30 percent or 40 percent that newspapers once returned (a golden egg per day), but maybe 10 percent or 12 percent (a golden egg per week).

That's a reasonable analogy for what happened to these newspapers in Maine.

In some ways it's sad to see the changes, but it can also mean good things. Owners not overburdened with debt can afford to cover the news and serve their communities.

Some will do that; other will not. It takes more than money to run a good community newspaper. It takes commitment and leadership; some newspapers have that, some don't.

Despite my optimism there are great uncertainties about how the newspaper world will fare in an Internet age.

Some newspapers require readers to pay for access to the paper's news on the Net.

Some withhold some content from the Net, offering it only to print subscribers.

Other publishers continue to put everything on the Web for free, hoping to attract more readers and, perhaps, advertisers.

There are discussions about charging aggregators like Google for the content they now take from newspapers for free. I expect that to happen and it could have a significant impact on newspaper revenue.

I don't know which of these approaches or what combination of them will work, but I am confident that one or more of them will succeed.

Newspapers will prosper in an Internet because readers and advertisers value the coverage newspapers provide and they can't get it anywhere else

The newspaper world of the future will be different from the one in which I started as a reporter in 1965.

But it will be an exciting world for journalists.

Most of my students think the days of print are ending.

I think they are wrong -- and I've told them so.

David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He is spending a year as the C. W. Snedden professor of journalism at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. E-mail davidbof fer@hotmail.com