Once, if you wanted the latest in news, sports scores, stock prices, used cars and the best strip club near the airport, the newspaper was the only place to turn. Nowadays, you simply go online. Which is why the proliferation of the Internet, combined with the recession, is edging the entire newspaper industry closer to extinction.

Detroit, the nation's 11th largest city, no longer has a daily which prints a full volume every day, and metropolises such as Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia could end the year without a traditional paper.

But do you even care? Or have the various other ways you read news, classifieds and the comics rendered newspapers obsolete? We ponder the pros and cons of a world without newspapers after the jump.

Without newspapers, we will no longer get all the news that is fit to print.

-- Let's just get this out of the way: The decline of the newspaper industry will make it more difficult to deal with cat poop or to wrap presents for those who aren't important enough to warrant store-bought wrapping paper.

-- Compared to newspapers, the crazy screamers of cable TV and talk radio don't have much of an overall market share. But without newspapers, the news of the day will increasingly become whatever crawled up the butts of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews.

-- While Internet writers do a fabulous job of adding snarky comments to important news stories (if we do say so ourselves) they don't have the resources to do much actual reporting. So without mainstream reporters putting their shoes to the pavement, your news will quickly digress to viral videos, breaking announcements of celebrity DUIs and Lolcats.

It's not the end of the world.

-- Assuming quality journalism will eventually be able to reconvene itself in a profitable Internet-only format, metrics-based analysis will allow these Web papers to cater to exactly what the audience wants. And if it's fart jokes, they will be the most well-researched and -edited fart jokes the world has ever known.

-- "Ha, for years I've been saying if [columnist at your local paper] doesn't stop with all that [political party or philosophy you dislike] crap, people would stop reading his rag. It feels great to be right!"

-- Paper-delivery boys are rarely boys. Instead they tend to be sinister adults who slowly canvas our neighborhoods while we sleep, and then ask for tips come Christmas. So there's that.