It bears repeating that it is not journalism that’s necessarily on the brink. It’s the newspaper business model that isn’t just on the brink, but hurtling back through time to the penny press days.

Yes, the Web makes it way cheaper to present content. And, yes, there are fewer barriers to entry to both content providers and technology. But one plus the other does not equal profits, or even sustaining revenue.

A lot of the discussion at “Journalism on the Brink” at the University of Washington last week (see Part One) focused on how the Web was changing journalism. Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Times and the soon-to-be-gone Post-Intelligencer, both were represented by non-traditional content providers who reflected the kind of wrong thinking that has doomed the U.S. newspaper industry into a certain shakedown, if not extinction. That is, that news on the Internet should be free, that newspapers need to be everything to everyone, and that aggregation and what I call “celebrity presentation” (folks such as the P-I’s Monica Guzman not reporting on anything, but snarking and Tweeting about what already exists on the Web).
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