Jack Shafer of Slate ties it all together on how the web is set to displace an awful lot of print media. It's all about the lower cost of production, and the industry's non-reaction to that simple fact.

He kicks it off by relating the present to past actions in the newspaper business: the consolidation events that kicked off due to technological changes in the post WWII era:

In 1953, Low of the Patriot Ledger placed his bet on a newfangled photocomposition device—the Photon—that set type on film instead of lead, did it six times faster, and did it tons cheaper. By 1956, the Patriot Ledger had fully integrated the Photon into its operation. This allowed Low to replace skilled workers with the unskilled, who could set more type in less time at much less cost, eventually displacing "a method of production that newspapers had been using for nearly a hundred years."

That technological change drove dinosaurs out of the business, and helped the more savvy survivors larger and more profitable. That win was shortlived though - the rise of the net pushed the cost of content production down, although that wasn't immediately obvious:

This is where blogs come in. The union-destroying technology Neiva describes continued to evolve, reducing newspaper costs. Ultimately, the technology trickled down to individual desktops in the form of affordable personal computers. When the Web arrived in the mid-1990s as an alternative publishing system, big media organizations and other well-funded entities were the only ones that could afford to build high-traffic, fancy Web sites.

Getting your own website was no easy thing back in the 90's. The process of editing content and getting it to a server was onerous, and the cost of running a server was - relative to the average person - high. Since then, costs have dropped - you can open up a free blog on numerous services, or get a hosted solution for about the same price as monthly cable TV service. Pushing up content is easier as well - the barrier is fairly non-existant. Anyone who wants to share their thoughts on a subject can.

All that has come as a shock to the news business:

Battelle extols what a new business can accomplish with $200,000 that would have taken millions just six years ago. If you combine Neiva's findings with Battelle's argument, you can make the case that the next entrenched "guild" that technology is likely to bulldoze is the "newspaper guild." I'm not speaking of the union of the same name, but of those who work in the news business—reporters, editors, publishers, radio and TV broadcasters, etc.

...

So, when newspaper reporters bellyache about shoot-from-the-hip bloggers who don't fully investigate the paper trail before writing a story or double-check their facts before posting, they're telling a valuable truth. Bad bloggers are almost as bad as bad journalists. But the prospect of a million amateurs doing something akin to their job unsettles the guild, making it feel like Maytag's factory rats whose jobs were poached by low-paid Chinese labor.

The entrenched media are reacting slowly and - for the most part, stupidly. Consider the New York Times. They have news production resources that most bloggers can't touch - people on the ground all over the world. So what do they put a pay wall in front of? The one place where their value-add is dropping like a rock: opinion mongering. Why should I pay to hear the thoughts of the Times' op-ed team - whether those thoughts are on sports, politics, fasion (etc, etc)? There are tons of people covering those beats for free, in far more detail than the Times can. Sure, many of the people blogging on those topics are lower quality. But many of them are as good or better, and the price is definitely right.

Meanwhile, the Times (and other outlets) are cutting back on the one area they have a shot at doing more with:

But instead of improving their product by deploying technology bloggers can't afford (yet), newspapers are devolving. Many are cutting staff. Daily newspapers are growing smaller and uglier, with no paper looking anywhere near as lovely as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World from the late 1800s. Comic strips have gotten so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read them. I'm fine with newspapers cutting back on stock tables, but they aren't adding something new to the package. Most newspapers claim they've shrunk their dimensions to combat steep increases in newsprint prices, but that's a lie.

Back when I first moved to Maryland, I paid for a subscription to the Baltimore Sun. Why? Because they had more pages of comics than any other paper I'd ever seen. Over time, they chopped the size of the comics, and also the number. At some point, I stopped reading. I used to read the Washington Times, not for the news coverage - it was pretty slim in that department. But they had a large (typically 4+ pages) op-ed section. I stopped reading that as well - I can get opinions in BottomFeeder far more easily.

Just at the point where good, objective, hard news coverage might be a value-add, it's getting harder to find in print media. As Shafer says, adding blogs and comment sections are fine, but they aren't a win for the papers - they need to tout something that the blogs can't do. They don't have much time to figure it out, either - between Google's ads, and the destruction of the classified business by Craigslist and Ebay, the entire business model is being torn apart.