In this case, the writing on the wall, as I read it, is that the print media may be shriveling to a pittance of its former self, and that the news industry in general will need a massive overhaul if it is to compete in an internet age. You make a number of valid points, but I would comment on a few (okay, all) of them as follows:

Paid online content may well be a future business model for news. I don't personally see any clear path towards it, but if I did I wouldn't be writing about why I don't. There may very well be a sweet spot where the amount charged via subscription or metered service is low enough to get a critical mass of subscribers but high enough to still cover costs. It's my personally opinion that such a sweet spot does not exist that could support news organizations as we know them. I simply do not believe that the current news organizations can market a product that can compete against the niche and hyperlocal news being produced on the internet at minimal costs. And as much as I'd enjoy the chuckle I'd get from watching the Washington Post writers bend themselves into knots extolling the benefits of Free Market capitalism while their bosses collude to make it illegal for Google to use the internet, I don't think government intervention is going to be any kind of silver bullet. Keeping newspaper content off of Google News only lowers your daily hit count, which is why Google has said they'd be happy to do it.

On the fact that the New York Times is not so ridiculous as to attempt to charge its subscribers twice, we agree.

With regard to the rise of the journalist/blogger/opinion sites, while I share your regret that they are without a doubt opinionated and have been known to brush aside the rules to make a point, I feel the exact same way about the print media. I would wager that for every newspaper in the country there is a commonly held belief about its political leanings. The LAT and NYT are liberal rags. The Washington Post is a Republican newsletter. The Washington Times is run by a South Korean cultist. The Orange County Register has the one of the most conservative editorial pages in the country. The Chicago Sun-TImes, though it used to be a Murdoch paper, is about as progressive as they come. And everyone knows these things--whether or not they're even demonstrably true. We have come to a point in our culture--thanks mostly to the cable news wars--that it is merely assumed that if it comes from a major news outlet, it has an agenda. So while there very well may be plenty of objective journalists out there, their work is being contaminated by the mere fact that Americans have been inundated with "Fair and Balanced" news from both ends of the political spectrum. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that a truly objective journalist would be desperate to be able to reach a wide audience without the machinery of a major news organization. The internet has made that possible.

Finally, I fear I was too glib in my statement that we would do away with the fact-checkers. I am of the firm--and perhaps naive--belief that the truth will out and that it will always make better business sense to give the facts as they are than to give them as we might like them to be. What I should have said was that each organization/niche blog/independent journalist need not employ their own fact checkers. For the same reason that I've already mentioned, it does no good for the New York Times to print something as fact. The southern half of this country will assume the opposite is true (to paint with an extraordinary broad and unfair brush) and George Will's next piece in the Washington Post will say the opposite and confirm it for them. I don't know if you had the pleasure of reading Will's column on climate change from last February, but it was chock full of facts and figures that have been debunked and denounced far and wide, but the Post has never run a retraction or supported its facts.

I have no doubt that line editors are good people and worth their weight in gold to the journalists with whom they collaborate, but the nature of their work has changed--and I say this with greatest amount of respect possible. Verification of fact requires establishing a source document or witness, and once upon a time that was an incredibly time-consuming and resource consuming job. The rapid dissemination of nearly all source documents, video, and transcripts online has made that job dramatically less demanding. The reality is that for all but the most groundbreaking and blow-the-lid-off-of-something stories, fact checking is something that not every future news organization will need. Maybe they set up independent organizations who hire out to others for individual articles or projects. Maybe they swell the ranks of organizations like factcheck.org and other endowment organizations. Whatever the case, I imagine the future of news will need to be too streamlined for all but the largest of institutions to employ full time line editors. The others will merely let the facts out themselves.

Paid online content is inevitable. To the extent that, 10 years from now (maybe 15) we'll look back to when news outlets allowed unlimited free access to their sites as a quaint period before shit got real on the balance sheets of newspapers. The problem is, no one knows what kind of paid model will ultimately work, so it is going to take plenty of trial and error by some of the giants in the industry before we find one that works. That's what you're seeing with NYT's latest plan to allow metered access to their content, just a scant two years after Times Select failed. There is no way of knowing what will register with regular readers and the 'one-click-wonders' alike, while having a significant impact on revenue.

Jeff Jarvis' fear that NYT would charge him for their online content when he is already a subscriber seems premature, as nearly every mention of charging for online content (among those who do not already do so), allows print subscribers full access behind the pay wall; no one is expecting people to pay twice. But people will be expected to pay once. This could be by way of an exemption to the Sherman Act for newspapers and wire services like AP, so they can collaborate on how best to prevent aggregators like Google News from providing their content for free, while simultaneously generating their own ad revenue from those clicks. (Frankly I think such an exemption will be passed by Congress, but only after the financial straits of enough media companies becomes dire enough that they raise a very big fuss). Or a metered model like the one NYT is supposedly considering. Ideas like an iTunes model have been floated about...where users have a credit card on file (or a PayPal account) and are allotted a certain number of free stories a day/week/month before being charge a nominal fee to read an article in its entirety. But as I said, we may see every iteration imaginable of charging for content before someone discovers that impossibly appropriate fee that is fair to readers, content providers and their respective wallets.

Be careful when you talk of news analysis and news. They are not the same thing. Yes, the interwebs have provided a remarkably fluid means of aggregating and disseminating news, and has allowed multitudes of subjective outlets one may 'trust' to analyze the f out of it. But the objective entities that are actually gathering, researching, learning and then producing the news, in any form, exist in smaller numbers than at any point in 200 years. This is dangerous. Yes, I understand the rise of bloggers and citizen journalism and I enthusiastically acknowledge that they have started to break news and get scoops. However (and yes, I'm generalizing here) these scoops are accomplished via methods that are ethically dubious by individuals or outlets with an agenda that reaches beyond simple news gathering; Obama's 'clinging to guns and religion' moment comes to mind, as the clip was recorded at a closed fund-raising event by a paying guest. Again, call me biased, but I want my news from an organization whose objectivity I can trust. With all the attention subjective sites like Gawker, Huffington Post (more disclosure...I used to work there) and Drudge Report get, it's frighteningly easy to overlook the fact that 99% of all their content...all their 'analysis'...comes from objective news organizations who foot the bill to produce the actual 'news.'

Fact-checkers (they'd ask you to call them line editors) are your best friend in the world. Yep, that Cronkite obit was a disaster and a low point not just for the NYT, but for the reputations of legitimate news orgs everywhere. But it was an anomaly. I would humbly beg you to rethink the assertion that 'fact-checkers' aren't needed since errors will be caught by the masses once it's posted on the internet. Such factual anarchy would have repercussions into every corner of our society. I don't mean to make news orgs sound like Batman, but it is they who serve as the fourth estate and check in on who what where when how and why and they do it because it is their responsibility to inform and educate so people can live better, smarter lives. Somewhere out there there is an airbag that is not going to deploy in a terrible car crash and as a result, someone is going to die. But by and large, airbags are an essential safety feature on vehicles that work flawlessly every day around the world. Are you going to hear about that one that doesn't deploy and renders that occupant dead as a result? Yes. Does it mean we should abolish all airbags simply because the innumerable functioning ones are overlooked? No.

Your point about news becoming more specialized is 100% dead on. At that aforementioned moment in the future when free unlimited online access will seem quaint, so too will the idea that a newspaper (and their website) will cover the entertainment industry in the same manner (if it does at all) as it covers politics. TMZ may be loathed in the traditional media world for their tactics in covering aspects of the entertainment industry, but they have nothing to gain by being incorrect. They serve the people looking for that kinds of news better than any 'traditional' media outlet can. Look at LAT's automotive coverage. 15 years ago, the paper had one of the best autos section in the country. Now their coverage is reduced to Dan Neil's weekly car review, and frankly, the future I've mentioned doesn't include even that level of attention. (More disclosure...I've done some autos coverage for LAT's online autos section). Readers will be better served then by sites that are solely devoted to autos. This, ostensibly, frees up the resources at newspaper to spend time (read: money) doing the kind of gumshoe, pound-the-pavement journalism that betters our lives and allows these outlets to appropriately serve as that essential, but oft-overlooked entity, the fourth estate.

Finally, your point about the newspaper industry not being efficient as it could be is unfortunately apt. As the employee of a paper that is at the end (one hopes) of a painful and public contraction, I like to think we're more lean and nimble than many of our competitors because we've had to face the inevitable (financial) music earlier. But at some point in the very near future, the dwindling resources of others in the industry will precipitate similar cost-shedding measures on a scale that is undoubtedly keeping many an executive editor, and everyone under him/her, up late at night.

Thanks for the piece. It was, as you may have noticed, thought-provoking at the very least.

And as a final addendum, the views expressed here are solely that of undercoffler, so please, direct all ill will towards him, rather than his employer, whom he likes very much. Cheers.