Having survived more than 40 years at the coalface of British journalism (longer than a term of service in the ancient Roman army), I have been feeling a bit depressed lately by the insistent predictions of media pundits that the internet is killing off quality newspapers. There are very few people in the trade who are prepared to bet that all our daily papers will still be publishing newsprint copies in five years' time.

According to conventional wisdom, print is doomed. Circulations are collapsing because readers can get everything they want on the internet. Not only do those readers dislike the idea of paying to read online, but the existence, among other sites, of the rival licence-fee-payer-funded BBC website guarantees that they will never actually need to pay for a supply of reliable day-to-day news. Paywalls will never really work in a UK context for that reason.

Yet when the day comes that the newspapers are forced to stop printing altogether, it will be a disaster for democracy. The lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate. We'll just get the timid BBC on the one hand, and superficial junk on the other.

In this glum frame of mind, I read the latest National Readership Survey figures. To my surprise, what leaped out from them was that there is now in existence a perfectly easy way to rescue newspapers, ensure media plurality, and monetise the web.

I realise the search for such a wondrous thing by beleaguered print editors has long been like the unachievable quest for the holy grail. But, arithmetically speaking at least, the British solution is obvious. Consumers won't pay for online news. But they are of course paying, now and for the foreseeable future, and in huge numbers, for the necessary broadband connections.

A small levy on UK broadband providers – no more than £2 a month on each subscriber's bill – could be distributed to news providers in proportion to their UK online readership. This would solve the financial problems of quality newspapers, whose readers are not disappearing, but simply migrating online.

There are almost 20m UK households that are paying upwards of £15 a month for a good broadband connection, plus another 5m mobile internet subscriptions. People willingly pay this money to a handful of telecommunications companies, but pay nothing for the news content they receive as a result, whose continued survival is generally agreed to be a fundamental plank of democracy.

A £2 levy on top – collected easily from the small number of UK service providers (BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk etc) who would add it on to consumers' bills – would raise more than £500m annually. It could be collected by a freestanding agency, on the lines of the BBC licence fee, and redistributed automatically to "news providers" according to their share of UK online readership.

On the most recent figures, this system would provide transformative chunks of money to the most popular news websites.

The Telegraph group, the Associated Newspapers' stable and the Guardian Media Group would each receive in the region of 20% of the cash – £100m a year. Even the Independent papers would pick up around £40m a year. Other titles, such as the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, could see a potentially life-supporting transfusion of £8m and £4m respectively.

Rupert Murdoch's Sun would collect an annual £50m, although his other papers, if they stayed behind a paywall, would receive relatively little.

There would be no insuperable problems in defining "news providers". The starting point would be to designate those organisations already classed by the state as zero-rated newspapers under the 1994 VAT legislation : "Newspapers … issued at least once a week in a continuous series under the same title … [which] contain information about current events of local, national or international interest. Publications which do not contain a substantial amount of news are not newspapers."

Other original news providers could subsequently apply to the independent levy board for admission to the scheme, case-by-case. But there would have to be a reasonable size threshold for admission, perhaps set at 100,000 monthly users, and also some rules to exclude content aggregators. The BBC website would not get any extra cash from the levy, as it is already financed by the British taxpayer.

Is this solution too politically fraught? The first party to adopt such a levy scheme will certainly get my future vote. The levy would, like the BBC, be operationally ring-fenced against "state intervention", although it might well be subject to the same long-term political tensions as the BBC licence fee.

That licence fee system still works more or less successfully, of course, just as the more extreme Nordic model of direct newspaper subsidy does. And perhaps we don't need to worry too much about the long term. For in the long term, all the newspapers might otherwise be dead.