Molly Wood, an executive editor and on-camera personality at CNETTV.com, recently wrote about the fate of newspapers at Women on the Web. Here are her thoughts:

The news about newspapers has been unavoidable in the past few weeks, with stories on everything from the insane cost of printing and publishing some newspapers to the extremely imminent death of others.

As someone who went from journalism school to a wire service to a website, I can’t help but feel slightly culpable — but I also feel protective of newspapers and the services they can provide to a community and a country. Some would argue, as my colleague Tom Merritt does in this week’s Buzz Report video, that the Internet is merely a delivery mechanism that doesn’t have to fundamentally change the way reporting and writing are carried out.

Sometimes, I think that’s true — there is amazing journalism happening on the Web, here at wowOwow.com, at Salon, at Huffington Post, at CNET, at Perez Hilton (OK, just kidding). On the other hand, blogs are easy to start and even easier to abandon, and the institution of a newsroom can provide air cover for deep digging that isn’t necessarily available at every online publication, as well as the legitimacy that gets you access to the really good sources. I hope we can see the difference between publishing technology and the intellectual pursuit of journalism as we cast aside our newspapers for netbooks and Kindles (guilty as charged).

And in other news this week, I hope that a new Apple netbook, should it appear in the near future, be a whole lot better than the new Shuffle they just announced.