Clay Shirky’s piece [Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/) is worth all the links it’s been getting:
> When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
He’s writing specifically about print journalism, but it’s hard not to extrapolate the argument to all our paid and unpaid media. What does television look like ten years from now? We don’t know. We scramble to establish bulwarks and business models, all the while quietly suspecting that we’re going to guess wrong.
> The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
Shirky’s article is a great candidate for the [Readability bookmarklet](http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/), by the way.