I had a long discussion with a very smart guy yesterday about how media, especially print media, can survive in our current online-obsessed, attention-span challenged culture. He didn’t work in print; he works for a company that makes an extremely high end product that appreciates intelligent media coverage and is finding it increasingly hard to come by. More and more, he argued, content is crucial, and despite all the easy outlets for publication, he finds very few places where there’s still intelligent writing about his space. Tons of websites and blogs that will rewrite a press release, he admitted, but little in-depth coverage.

I was thinking about that this morning as I conducted my morning scan of newspapers and I saw this story in the Los Angeles Times: “And the winner of ‘The Voice’ is …

I’d love to talk to the entertainment editor at the Times to say, why on earth would you cover that story?

First of all, if you care about the singing competition show—and I won’t even raise the question of why anyone would—you already know the answer. Even if you didn’t watch the finale, you’d find out the results on a blog.

Second, are Los Angeles Times readers, or newspaper readers in general, really the type of people who care about The Voice? (And if they do, see above.) I can’t believe anyone’s turning to the LAT for that kind of trivial pop culture coverage.

Third, where’s the value-added? What could the Times, with all its resources, add to this “story” that a million other entertainment outlets could not?

And yet, I see this kind of dumbing down in newspapers all across the country—in the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post. Chasing the tail of the youth zeitgeist, covering television shows as if they were news—it’s not going to be how newspapers survive. Instead, they should focus their resources on reporting meaningful stories that people won’t find anywhere else.

Sometimes I think that the newspaper business is dying because of the Internet, and sometimes I think it’s dying because, mostly, it just isn’t very good.