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When some people first heard the news about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a prostitution ring, they thought: How awful, how tragic, how corrupt. When I first heard it, I thought: Thank God for newspapers.

As you probably know, it was The New York Times that broke the story, igniting the kind of "firestorm" that prompts breathless news junkies everywhere to burble cliches like "firestorm" as they drool at the TV screen and click desperately from channel to channel.

After all, TV was just following The Times, as were the bloggers and the Twitterers and the Diggers and the Yahoos and the Googles and everyone else in the media universe. This is how it works, even today when there are so many cooler, shinier ways to get news. For the real thing, the stuff that outs corruption and hypocrisy, revealing the powerful for who they really are and shaking things up in the most immediate, consequential ways -- in short, the scandals that are truly scandalous -- nobody else can touch newspapers. Where would we be without them?

It's not an idle question. Even when they're not digging up the dirt themselves (Spitzer was undone by a criminal investigation), the prestige dailies have the credibility and reach to make a scandal like this one fly. On the day it broke the Spitzer story online, the hard-copy Times ran a story on page one of the business section about two hedge funds, Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, that together have acquired a 19 percent stake in The Times's parent company and are using this leverage to try to change the way the company is managed.

As the story noted, the price of a share of New York Times stock has dropped from more than $50 in 2002 to less than $18 today. This is when the vultures start circling and doing what vultures do best:

"The funds are challenging the company's investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry beyond the flagship New York Times. Like many analysts, they see The Boston Globe and a group of 15 local papers as a drain on the company, which should, they argue, be focused on extracting the greatest possible advantage from the Times brand."

It was appropriate that although the Spitzer story broke online, where all of the action is in the media, the company's business woes should appear in the paper version, where the action isn't. Because the problem with the newspaper business is on the paper side of things. The Globe, for instance, is a drag on The Times because fewer and fewer people want to pay for the hard copy, which makes it less appealing to advertisers. And the free online version doesn't pull in enough ad bucks to make up the difference.

True, it was The Globe that last week broke the news that the biggest U.S. contractor in Iraq is using offshore shell companies to avoid certain taxes. Never mind, that's just journalism. When it comes to extracting "the greatest possible advantage" from a brand, the value of the journalism itself doesn't figure much in the calculations. Because you can't put a number on it.

Of course, if news truly matters, it should sell in the marketplace and support itself. The nation's premier news operations should also turn a profit, and a handsome one. Newspapers did it in the 20th century, and eventually somebody will figure out how to do it again, in the digital sphere.

What's strange is that while society is working on this puzzle -- and the vultures swoop overhead -- there isn't a wider appreciation for exactly what newspapers do for us. We all depend, literally, on such great broadsheets as The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post to ferret out news with real meaning and impact, of which the Spitzer resignation is just this week's specimen.

Yet most of the time, we give these papers the back of our hand, often for the most parochial of reasons. Conservatives hate The Times because it's too left-wing. Liberals hate it because it's too right-wing (jeez, they hired Bill Kristol!). Everyone hates the elite papers when they make a dumb error.

Their flaws drive us so crazy, there's an unspoken feeling that somehow we'd be better off without them. And that may be the biggest scandal of all.