Clinamen

Rather than a case of identity crisis, my view of the newspapers' dilemma in the Internet age is along the lines of what Clay Shirky lays out in a recent blog essay:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

In short, the Internet has made it so that newspapers (and news magazines) are no longer the be-all end-all of advertising venues to accompany textual news. As Shirky puts its, Wal-Mart no longer has to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. Newspapers know, more or less, what their identity is: they employ real journalists to generate the kinds of original stories that Cuban likes. How they make money has never been strongly aligned with that identity except by historical accident, since readers of newspapers (who reap the benefits of good journalism) have not been the ones who pay for more than a fraction of the costs. So they are trying everything they can to find some--any--sort of revenue model that will work. Shirky argues--and I hope he's wrong--that there isn't one.

In economic terms, newspapers were benefiting from a distorted market for advertisements. Newspapers funneled the extra profit from advertisements into funding reporters. The Internet is removing some of that distortion, so newspapers are shrinking or folding, and the press corps is going down with them. Google has created a far more rationalized market for advertising than newspapers ever offered.

I don't think it has much at all to do with being displaced by amateurs or failing to properly transform content for the web environment, since the profitably of newspapers was never directly linked to their content. As many have observed, in the era of blogging, newspapers still provide the essential grist for both television and blog punditry. But finding new ways for real investigative journalism to thrive--whether done by displaced professionals, amateurs, or both together--is necessary if American society is not to lose the common good of a strong Fourth Estate.