Rieder: Why would anyone buy a newspaper?

It's not as if the plight of newspapers has gone unrecognized.

Much has been written about the challenges they face trying to survive in the digital age.

With their business model thoroughly disrupted, with ad revenue, circulation and staff sizes down, often way down, they are struggling mightily to reinvent themselves for a very different era.

So why would anyone, particularly a savvy businessman, want to buy one?

John Henry, who completed his acquisition of The Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. last week, took a stab at answering that question in a piece in the Globe's Opinion section on Sunday.

Henry, the onetime rock 'n' roll guitarist who made his fortune in commodities trading, is best known as the owner of the Boston Red Sox. The team, which is battling the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, has had a very successful run under his ownership. And now Henry says he wants to secure the future of another signature New England institution.

The new owner of the Globe is one of a number of wealthy, newly minted newspaper owners who believe journalism is vital to a community and newspapers are not lost causes. Like Amazon.com founder and Chairman Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post and former greeting-card executive Aaron Kushner at the Orange County Register, Henry speaks of spending money to make the paper more vital rather than engaging in round after punishing round of cutbacks that weaken the product.

Henry, who purchased the paper for the fire-sale price of $70 million, also wants the Globe and its websites, BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com, to play a key role in the quest for an elusive new business model for journalism.

Ownership by wealthy individuals rather than publicly held companies that are so wedded to the quarterly numbers give these institutions what Bezos calls "runway," time to look for creative solutions to the thorny problems that plague the industry.

Henry says he first thought about buying the newspaper in 2009, in! the midst of the recession, when the New York Times Co. was thinking about shutting down the Globe. He decided the problems it faced were too formidable, and he passed. But Henry couldn't entirely get the idea of taking over the Globe out of his mind. So when the newspaper went on the block last winter, he got back in the game.

"I soon realized that one of the key things the paper needed in order to prosper was private, local ownership, passionate about its mission," he wrote. "And so decisions about The Boston Globe are now being made here in Boston. The obligation is now to readers and local residents, not to distant shareholders."

And then there is this very intriguing sentence: "My every intention is to push the kind of boldness and investment that will make the Globe a laboratory for major newspapers across the country."

"Boldness" and "investment" happen to be two of the things the newspapers need most desperately. And having real-life laboratories at the Globe and the Post overseen by deep-pocketed owners is an exciting prospect.

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In Southern California, Kushner has an against-the-grain experiment of his own underway at the Register. He has dramatically stepped up spending, hiring scores of new reporters and adding pages to the newspaper. And he has started up a new newspaper in Long Beach, triggering a newspaper war. It's an audacious bet on print.

All of these developments, along with Warren Buffett's newspaper-buying spree, reflect a growing belief that print may have been written off too quickly. While no one doubts that the future will be digital and that heavy digital emphasis right now is crucial, it's clear that some very smart people believe print newspapers are worth sustaining.

Significantly, Bezos demurred when friends told him he should eliminate the print version of the Post. He said the actual newspaper is essential both to the D.C. community and the paper's business model.

Whil! e the Glo! be has both a free website (Boston.com) and a subscription model (BostonGlobe.com), it's clear that Henry sees charging for digital content as a key part of the Globe's future. "I feel strongly that newspapers and their news sites are going to rely upon the support of subscribers to a large extent in order to provide what readers want," he wrote. "It is a newspaper's responsibility to create enough value to cause readers to subscribe to their services and advertisers to advertise."

And speaking of the future, Henry stresses that he doesn't see newspapers going away anytime soon. Just as television didn't mean the death knell for movies and radio, Henry doesn't think the plethora of free news that's now available will mean the end of newspapers. In fact, he believes, it heightens their importance as a reliable venue to help readers sort things out.

The Globe has long been a strong regional newspaper. It led the way in coverage of the Catholic priest sex-abuse scandal, and it performed admirably during the Boston Marathon massacre.

So let's hope Henry can extend the Sox's winning ways to his new franchise. And let's hope the new breed of owners can help chart a strong future for journalism.