Taking two steps back

It didn't take long for a reply to Clay Shirky's analysis of the newspaper industry.

The blogosphere was alive with comment on the piece yesterday but of all the comment it is worth reading Bill Thompson who says that

we should not mourn the passing of the newspaper, but ask instead what function it performed and look to see whether we are in need of a similar system in the new world. If it has no space to fill then we should pause before we try to carve one out for it.

For Thompson-

we should take two steps backwards and ask ourselves where the drive to journalism comes from, what problems in industrial society have ‘journalism’ as their solution, and whether the networked society we are pushing towards so resoutely will have those problems.