David Westphal, the newspaperman turned academic, signals his belief that the debate is done and gone. He believes that the way ahead involves an understanding that the Internet ravaged the old business and that what was will not be.
"The war ended. The prophets turned out to be correct. The Internet has changed, is changing, everything -- or close enough to everything that they get full credit," he writes in Online Journalism Review.
As for the future: "What a richer world this will be when new-media thinkers critique new media with the same vigor they bring to old media, when old-media veterans feel free to say that old ways don't work and may not have been the greatest anyway."