My longtime friend David Kindred, best wordsmith of my newspaper generation, has a new book out about one of his former employers, The Washington Post, and how it has coped with the swift and startling changes in the communications business. Those who know Dave’s work will not be suprised to learn that it’s beautifully written and meticulously reported — a definite “must read” for anybody who loves newspapers and cares about their future.

There are heroes and villains aplenty, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. From the zenith of its power in the early 1990s, the Post’s decline was, and is, breath-taking to behold. Understand, it’s still one of the two or three best papers in the nation. But as Kindred shows us, not even the Post, with its vast resources, has been able to figure out how to effectively cope with the stampede of readers and advertisers to the internet.

Thanks largely to publisher Donnie Graham — one of the heroes — the Post has struggled mightily to maintain its high journalistic standards even as it has repeatedly been forced to cut its staff and slash its budget. Through this decade, the Post has hemmoraged money in huge globs, kind of like that oil gunk that has polluted the Gulf Coast beaches.

Some of the problems have been the paper’s fault — an institutional inability to heed warnings and acknowledge that the sky was, indeed, falling. But much of it has to do with the tsunami-like quickness and power with which the internet and all its attendant gadgetry overwhelmed the traditional forms of media.

The overriding question, which the book leaves unanswered because nobody has reached a solution, is this: Who’s going to be the watchdog on our society if newspapers die out?

When the Founding Fathers drew up the Constitution, they assumed, logically, that a free and independent press always would be an important part of the American landscape. They assumed that said press would be the “fourth estate” that always would keep a vigilant eye on the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, not to mention any individuals or groups that did not respect each citizen’s right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

As our nation grew, so did the press — now known as “the media” — and it functioned, by and large, precisely as the Founders had envisioned it. Great papers did great work on the public’s behalf. Great editors, writers, and reporters identified scoundrels, exposed corruption, and raked the muck when it needed raking.

In the early 1970s, by allowing a couple of young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue a scandal that came to be known as Watergate, the Post did more than force a President to resign. It made journalism a legitimate career choice for idealistic young people who grew up believing the promises made by John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, among others.

But even as Bernstein and Woodward, along with Post publisher Katherine Graham (Donnie’s mother) and executive editor Ben Bradlee, were giving American journalism its finest hour, a newspaperman in Louisville was telling his staff that the day was coming when newspapers would become obsolete and all news would be delivered electronically.

In the newsroom of The Courier-Journal, we snickered at Barry Bingham Jr. and his handlebar mustache. How could he make such an absurd prediction? Hadn’t he been following the Post’s role in the Watergate story? Didn’t he know that his own morning newspaper — we also had the afternoon Louisville Times in those days — had home circulation in all 120 Kentucky counties and was the one institution that tied the state together?

Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bingham was a prophet without honor. I suspect that, had he not been forced to dissolve the Bingham media empire in 1986, the C-J would have been much better prepared to deal with the Internet revolution than almost any other paper in the country. I think the C-J might have been in the vanguard of putting its product online and finding a way to make money from it.

Kindred was working in Louisville back then and he was one of us who rolled the eyes at Mr. Bingham’s goofy notions. I think the main reason Dave and I became friends, other than our love of sports, was that we both loved newspapers. I was just out of college and single; he was newly married with a son. But morning after morning, we met in the office and began working the phones in pursuit of stories to write. We just loved the smells and sounds and pure electricity of being in a newspaper office, working around the people in charge of putting out the “morning miracle.”

That turned out to be the title of Dave’s book and it’s an apt one. Even now, the morning newspaper is a daily miracle that we still take for granted. Someone once defined a newspaper as “a first rough draft of history.” I like that. Every edition has its share of mistakes and misjudgments because the entire process is subjective and human. But the attempt to get it right — to be honest and fair in all cases, big and small — is about as noble and worthwhile an undertaking as I can imagine.

I’m biased, of course. All editors, writers, and reporters are, whether we admit it or not. One of the great challenges of being a journalist is to stifle those biases in an effort to be fair. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. But we always have tomorrow to get it right.

At various times during the reading of Dave’s book, I alternately felt angry, sad, and frustrated. It is not a happy, feel-good story with a tidy ending In fact, more than anything, the book reflects just how untidy the newspaper mess is. Nobody has answers and everybody is guessing. It’s a state that’s uncomfortable and unnatural to journalists. But the book also sparked in me the hope that because enough people still care about good journalism and the press’s role as watching, that the spirit of great newspapering will survive, however it may be packaged and distributed.

At some point, I think, newspaper publishers and editors must convene a summit conference that would include leaders from government, business, and education. They must determine how the nation should move forward in preserving the role of the Fourth Estate as it’s mandated in the Constitution. A free and independent press is vital to the guarantees the Constitution makes to our citizens. The country simply cannot work without it because those who would abuse power would have free rein to trample on the rights of the poor and the weak.

It would help if the average citizen would take it upon himself to understand the role of the press and how it works instead of simply listening to radio gasbags blather about “the mainstream media” and do everything in their power to discredit and undermine one of our nation’s most vital institutions. Kindred’s book will help you do that. It will help you understand the passion for goodness and decency that always has defined great newspapers and set the standard for the rest of the industry.