To me it's pretty clear that they mean, "we don't know how to make web advertising pay the bills around here." As for "ambitious news gathering", there I kind

To me it's pretty clear that they mean, "we don't know how to make web advertising pay the bills around here." As for "ambitious news gathering", there I kind of agree with them; I'm not sure that there's much of a future in the broad, frequent and relatively superficial net that the New York Times and similar papers throw. Newspapers are set up on the premise that broadly disseminating a variety of news is hard, and requires a mediator, but that's not the case anymore. Blog-level coverage is just fine for a lot of things in the popular sphere. In depth and investigative stuff I'll get from The New Yorker or The Economist (which I would pay for).