What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.
It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.
America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago.
I've traveled around the country and I read local newspapers and all of that, and it's a sad, sad thing to go from city to city and see the small newspapers and they're tiny. They're tiny not only in size but also in scope.
Budget cuts are a sad reality in most newsrooms, and I am concerned that they reduce the collective muscle of journalists who are doing the expensive, and often dangerous, work of on-the-ground reporting.
If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
I have never lived through any time in my career when there haven't been grave challenges facing newspapers.
We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate, of our journalism, has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.
