Clay Shirky pretty much nails everything here, and not in a mean way at all:
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
It is all there, paid content fiction, the recent history, the distant history. Read it all.
