It may be an oxymoron to say newspapers could become nonprofits, since so many of them already are — in the sense of not having any profits, that is. For some time, journalists have been hashing around two possible solutions to a broken business model: nonprofit status (which CommonWealth has had since its inception) or micro-payments, in which users pay a few cents to read a given article (much as iTunes users pay per song). For those outlets considering the former, Congress is getting into the act, Bloomberg News reports, with a bill allowing existing newspapers to convert to tax-exempt, nonprofit status.

If a paper like the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Los Angeles Times (both in various stages of bankruptcy proceedings) or the Boston Globe becomes a nonprofit, the biggest immediate change readers would see would be on the editorial page: papers could no longer endorse political candidates. But it’s easy to speculate on more subtle content changes down the road. Would a change in status — and the ensuing expectation that papers exist for the public good — shift a paper’s delicate balance between the kind of story that seems to have no purpose other than drawing readers’ eyes and the kind that keeps the citizenry informed and engaged? And will outlets that remain for-profit become ever-more sensational in order to survive?

Certainly, the aptly named blog Newspaper Death Watch suggests there’s already evidence of what might be considered a wholesome nonprofit mindset among news outlets — even those that are still, ostensibly, trying to make money.