Amid the gloominess about the health of the newspaper industry, I’m occasionally heartened by signs of hope.

Such as the striking multimedia report on the Lahaina fire produced by The New York Times website headlined “Inside the Deadly Maui Inferno, Hour by Hour.”

Combining visuals and data such as 3D maps created by Google, cellphone video and photos, graphics, text messages, 911 calls and documented acts of public agencies — all combined with old-fashioned reporting, interviewing and narrative writing — the Times produced a riveting re-creation of how the fire raged with officialdom asleep at the wheel and desperate residents trying to escape the flames.

The technology of storytelling has changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I started as a reporting intern in 1968, but the elements of solid journalism sorely needed in a functioning society remain the same.

The Times, with its long history of leadership in print journalism, is unfortunately one of only a few newspapers that have found a financial model with promise of long-term sustainability, as readers flee to the internet for “free” news that’s often unreliable junk.

THAT’S POINTED OUT in a new book by former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.”

Baron mostly covers billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Post from the Graham family, and the ensuing battles with the administration of Donald Trump, who used the powers of the federal government against Bezos’ main business, Amazon, in a largely unsuccessful attempt to rein in aggressive coverage of his questionable dealings by the Post.

But Baron also details how the Post recovered from moribund finances, shrinking staff and declining journalism to reclaim its mojo after Bezos’ acquisition as the leading force in holding official Washington to account.

The reporting staff grew by hundreds, ambitious investigations were launched and Bezos’ innate understanding of the internet led to a more modern website with features that would attract younger readers and help the Post gain digital subscribers by the millions.

As Baron concluded his victory lap, however, he expressed concern for the Post’s long-term sustainability, worrying that it wasn’t matching the Times in ingraining itself into readers’ lives.

Sure enough, readership sagged when the relentless drama of the Trump presidency came to an end, and as I was reading Baron’s book, news broke that the Post was changing CEOs for the second time in a year as revenues declined and layoffs loomed.

The Post’s troubles are a large-scale reflection of nationwide community newspaper woes as staffing and news hole shrink to match sinking revenues.

More than two local newspapers a day are dying and not being replaced by alternatives with comparable news, business, sports and lifestyle coverage, according to Northwestern University. It reports a fifth of the nation’s population lives in “news deserts,” creating a “crisis for our democracy.”

When newspapers die, readers who fled to the internet find out too late that much of their free news was lifted from the defunct daily and is no longer there.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.