Remember how newspapers are dying? Maybe it's old news.

The first half of 2008 is over, and there's more bad news for print: 11 publicly traded newspaper companies since 2005 plunged $23.7 billion from January to June. That's nearly just as much as they fell in the three previous years combined, according to longtime newspaper man and media analyst Alan Mutter.

There are other ways to measure papers' collective cancer outside market values. "Buyouts," in which employees agree to leave for a severance package valued at their years with the paper, have reached nearly every major newspaper, with The New York Times announcing its first wave in March and The Washington Post clearing out some top reporters and its executive editor a few weeks ago.

All of these riveting developments haven't exactly made newsrooms the happiest places to work. Many journalists eligible for buyouts are no longer mulling over if they want to stay; they're debating when they want to leave. Bureaus that had 10 reporters working every day last year now have four doing the same amount of work for the same pay.

There is, however, at least a remnant of a silver lining, a gasp of fresh air in a room full of pollution: It's a great time to be an intern.

Reporters like me, either finishing college or fresh out of it, are working for cheap to nothing but gaining newsroom experience that can't be taught in class. And most of us are getting front-page stories out of it because there aren't enough writers at these papers.

Whether newspapers (or websites) will be accepting our applications in six months is another story. At my first day at The Hartford Courant this summer, I was buzzing around meeting veteran reporters with precious advice for my future. One asked me what I was studying at Boston University.

"Print journalism," I chirped.

"Get out of this business," she said.

The Courant (owned by Tribune Co. and real-estate mogul Sam Zell) is about a week away from its latest buyout deadline. Now the "million-dollar question," as one reporter put it, is who is taking it and who isn't. The Post's Howard Kurtz doesn't bury the lede at all in saying it's a tough time for everyone at newspapers.

But it also is, or at least should be, a tough time for readers who care about stories that take some real quality work, digging and months of research to unearth. The first reporters to leave at many papers are the investigative journalists, who don't typically count their success on bylines and inches but on the impact of their groundbreaking scoops.

The industry is showing few signs of healing. Maybe it will take more demand from the public to revitalize the news business. Or maybe the 21st-century newspaper is no different than the steam locomotive: fun to ride for a while, but quickly outdated.