Old media will survive the blog age.

SOME smart "entrepreneur" should get to work on a parody song rifled "Bloggers Killed the Newspaper Star." The original MTV generation will get the reference to days gone by when the network ran these strange things called "music videos." The first video MTV ran was "Video Killed the Radio Star." If you haven't noticed, that didn't quite pan out. Radio surely has its problems, but it's still around. Meanwhile, MTV is now basically a "lifestyle" network, running programming remarkably similar to that of PBS, A&E and other adult networks. For all their radical chic, MTV's fans are just like the past generations they so desperately want to transcend.

This should serve as a cautionary tale for those betting big on the doomsday scenarios being peddled about the implosion of the newspaper industry, as well as to those who await the triumph of the so-called "blogosphere." The more the media seems to change, the more its underlying patterns keep re-emerging. There's truly nothing new under the sun.

A slew of Chicken Little reports have warned of late that newspapers are on the decline, as evidenced by the latest numbers showing that in the six-month period ended in March, major newspaper circulation dropped nearly 2 percent. Meanwhile, the Internet is no longer the Rodney Dangerfield of media. According to Advertising Age, the combined ad revenues of Google and Yahoo! will be on par with the combined revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC.

There's no denying that the media landscape is changing right before our eyes. But then, it has never stopped changing. Newspapers have been in decline for more than two decades--since long before the Internet became a media player. The Big Three nightly news broadcasts have been bleeding viewers for a long time as well. Today the average age of the nightly network news viewer is 60 and rising, while the share of viewers under the age of 35 is less than 10 percent. CBS News is contemplating ideas to get younger viewers, but it's hard to see how anyone watching "Pimp My Ride" is going to switch to "CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer."

But none of the newspaper industry's woes necessarily translate into the utopian fantasy of a world where blogs role supreme. People forget that less than a decade ago, everyone was convinced that the Web was going to replace television. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into Web TV networks. The reality was something quite different. For some bizarre reason, people prefer to watch "Star Trek" reruns while splayed out on the couch or in bed--not sitting upright at their desk, staring at a computer.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere--the fancy word for the vast digital arena where everyone from Olsen Twin stalkers to investigative journalists share their views and observations--is coalescing. Big media outlets are starting blogs and buying up the best bloggers. Independent bloggers are joining forces to achieve economies of scale for advertising and editorial direction. It's not inconceivable that consolidation will continue to the point where bloggers become new online newspapers.

If history is any guide, the Internet won't kill the traditional media, it will be absorbed by it.

Jonah Goldberg is a syndicated columnist.