Jack Shafer, writing for Slate, strikes a different note in the media-are-dying chorus. His view is that the arrival of technology to enable a wider range of participants in the profession/craft means the arrival of a new, golden age.

"If the downside of the battered-down barriers to entry is less pay and lower status, the potential upside is that a flood of new entrants into the field could portend a journalistic renaissance," he writes.

Now, he admits this isn't going to mean every newcomer takes on exalted status and audience. "But journalism has generally benefited by increases in the number of competitors, the entry of new and once-marginalized players, and the creation of new approaches to cracking stories."

His conclusion: "Just because the journalism business is going to hell and it may no longer make economic sense to maintain mega-news bureaus at the center of war zones doesn't mean that journalism isn't thriving."

Jack Shafer, in his latest media column for Slate, says the problem with newspapers isn't that they took to the Web too late --- it's that they took to it early and failed to reinvent it.

Shafer correctly points out that papers spawned sites a decade ago and more, have poured immense resources into the Web, but make all of their sites simply a repurposed ink-on-paper content platform, with all the same values and temperment. Their failure has been in not defining a new identity, he argues.

I'd argue back that, until recently, the tools for robust innovation (the social media tools in particular) weren't readily available. Give news organizations more time and they'll adopt them and adapt their digital enterprises. While it's true that too many papers made their sites --- and can still make their sites --- brochures for the print edition, many are developing more innovative ways of creating and distributing content. It's not time to conclude anything, despite the uneven results to date.

Newspapers are now newsrooms and in some cases newscentres. Their steady momentum to the end of the day and the print deadline has been replaced by an incessant humming of the 24/7 digital priority.
It is a news manager's challenge to help reshape the culture, and one of those cultures is the layered editing that often improves and occasionally blandizes the reporter's copy.
The Washington Post has done as much as any North American media to operate across platforms in the last decade. Its washingtonpost.com functions separately from the newspaper, in a different state, and while the two complement each other, they have distinctive qualities that make for a slightly different content organization and hierarchy --- and thus a different consumer experience.
In recent days the Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie, has outlined changes to the production of the newspaper to put it on a more aggressive footing in the new environment. His memo  (available through Slate.com) is an insightful elegy to different days and a clear signal that times have forever changed. In particular it is instructive to read how some non-local desks are being merged, how the rhythm of the newsroom will change to adapt to earlier consumer expectations in the day, and how the newsroom will reduce the number of "touches" on a story (they found as many as 12 editors --- yikes --- had handled a story in one instance).