A flurry of recent articles have raised the unthinkable newspaper question: What if the New York Times ceased to print and went online only. Michael Hirschorn, writing in The Atlantic magazine, went so far as to suggest that, given The Times’ financial difficulties, the moment could come as early as this coming May.

While Hirschorn quickly concedes that a May closure is highly unlikely – The Times still has many options to reduce its debt – he points out that that the move to digital is unrelenting. The Times sells 1.4 million copies of its Sunday print edition, while online, the site receives 30 million unique visitors a month, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet.

But reading on the Web itself is only part of the picture. Nicholas Carlson posted an article in last month’s Silicon Alley Insider analyzing how much The Times would save if it switched all of its subscribers to a portable reading device like the surprisingly successful Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle retails for $359 and the Times has 830,000 readers who have subscribed to the print edition for more than two years (the figure comes from an open letter from Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis). If The Times bought every one of those subscribers a Kindle, it would come out to $297 million.

Carlson goes next pointed out that it costs about $644 million to print and distribute the physical newspaper (the math: The Times financial report has production costs at $844 million and newsroom costs at $200 million a year).

As a result, if The Times were to kill its paper print run and switch to a Kindle-only model, the company would actually come out ahead by some $346 million. And that doesn’t even include revenues from Kindle subscriptions to the paper.

Kit Eaton took Carlson’s math to task in an article appearing in yesterday’s Fast Company. Not everyone who reads The Times is a subscriber, so only a fraction of the $644 million goes for producing the paper for subscribers. People who pick up a copy at the newsstand wouldn’t receive their free Kindle.

But if the trend is clearly towards electronic, and options like the Kindle – or the upcoming tabloid-sized Plastic Logic E-Reader – become widespread, we should expect to see more newspapers exploring a variety of Web-based and mobile reading options.

A digital-only Times would certainly have a different constitution than today’s product, The Atlantic’s Hirschorn points out. It would have to mix traditional reporting with external Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets (read: blogs) along with aggregation from across the Web. Hirschorn calls it “a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post.”

And there’s one more thing. The new U.S. administration under Barack Obama has from day one been stressing more ecologically friendly alternatives. That doesn’t have to stop at more fuel-efficient electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. Saving all that newsprint is just as worth a goal.

Sure we’d be sad to see the end of a print paper as venerable as The New York Times. But as Hirschorn writes, “A disaster? In the long run, maybe not.”

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