Quite frankly, I don't see this as being too much of a problem. The main purpose of newspapers is to inform people of happenings in the world (duh). With the ad

Quite frankly, I don't see this as being too much of a problem. The main purpose of newspapers is to inform people of happenings in the world (duh). With the advent of the internet, this has become less and less necessary because individuals now have a plethora of outlets from which to receive their news. They no longer are constrained to buying a package of papers in order to learn what is going on around them. I'm not saying that newspapers are bad, quite the opposite. I just figure that printed news is no longer as important as it used to be. The author mentions he is worrying about who will be the "watchdogs" of the politicians, etc. This worry is ungrounded. One only has to observe such things as the blogosphere to know that as long as the internet is not a censored medium, we will have our watchdogs. I'll admit that with user generated news the average quality of news decreases. This is only due to the quantity of "worthless" news that circulates the net. I think that the newspaper industry will never die completely, as people do enjoy reading from paper. Still, it must drastically shrink according to basic economics. It can only be as large as demand allows it to be. There is no reason to consider this a "bad thing".