There’s a very interesting discussion taking place on Poynter Online over a column written by Roy Peter Clark, a journalist and writing coach, who believes that the only way to secure the future of journalism is to buy and read printed newspapers. What’s more, he says, it is the responsibility of every journalist to do so!

As you can imagine, this has caused a fair amount of controversy, and responses to this call to action have ranged from the defensive to the downright personal and rude.

The catalyst for this argument is based on the perceived decline in newspaper readership in the U.S and parts of Europe, which comes as a major threat to many traditional journalists and dead tree lovers, who see this as a challenge to their livelihoods and quality journalism in general. The fact of the matter is that these fears go as far back as the 1940′s with the introduction of earlier disruptive technologies, but more recently the Internet has become a scapegoat.

In South Africa and other parts of the developing world, our biggest problem is not a decline in print circulation, which is in a healthy state for now, but one of press freedom as the recent case against Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya and Jocelyn Maker aptly demonstrates.

My theory is that without a free press, quality journalism gets relegated to an afterthought, so it might be a while before we see local journalists debate the merits of printed newspapers and their relationship to quality journalism.