Unlike online news blogs, websites, and even some online newspapers, print newspapers "organize the world each day in a coherent way," as David Thorburn, director of the Communications Forum at MIT, has noted. Newspapers create this organization through their division into sections and subsections. Online newspapers are also organized in this way, but only a hard copy of a newspaper can easily and serendipitously present articles that you might not otherwise read, because stories on various subjects cover the pages of a newspaper. Online newspapers have yet to mimic this way of presenting stories, because online newspapers tend to be customized to suit a reader's interests or only provide links to related content.
Blogs and personal websites give people excellent ways to share their ideas and viewpoints, but these do not usually have the same credentials as a newspaper. Newspapers have this extra credibility because, unlike personal blogs and websites, the content of a newspaper has to be approved by an editor. Therefore, if a photographer or journalist wants to have their work published in a newspaper, they need to have expertise in their field, while bloggers and website hosts do not always have such expertise.
Newspapers are also important because they contain a spectrum of articles and photographs on topics ranging from local politics to world culture that are available even to people who do not have a computer or Internet connection. The variety of newspapers' articles sets them apart from blogs, which often concentrate on a single topic. This makes blog-only news-gathering time consuming, as you would likely have to read 100 blogs every day to be exposed to the same variety of articles and stories as those contained in a newspaper. As Dante Chinni, a media columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, has noted, one blogger might have a great deal of knowledge on a single topic, but that blogger will not have the same level of knowledge of many other topics, unlike a newspaper.
Similar information may be available through online sources, but information online is more likely to be strongly biased than most newspaper reporting. Even if a newspaper contains some bias, this bias usually reflects the bias of that newspaper's subscribers. Thus, even though there is some bias in them, newspapers are especially important for a democratic society because they can be relied on to provide people with information on government and politics that does not try to sway or alter its readers' beliefs. Newspapers have also been important in maintaining the right to free and open information. Therefore, newspapers are important for maintaining a free and democratic state.