The problem, as I see it, is that newspapers (print or online) operate very differently from other forms of media, like TV, radio and blogs, and make a very different product. Newspapers are the only media institutions that continually cover wide beats. They have a reporter in city hall whether or not something interesting is happening there, one in court, and one in Germany. This makes print reporters much more knowledgeable about their respective beats than other kinds of reporters, and that's why most breaking stories originate in newspapers. TV, on the other hands, is usually a secondary news collection organization. It often lets the newspapers break a story before covering it themselves. This means that they can afford to send a reporter to Germany only when something interesting is going on there.

Newspapers have been able to support this model because their customers buy a package. They pay the same price every day because they have to buy the entire paper, though they are likely interested interested in a different story each time. This means that when there's news in Iraq, people buy the paper for the Iraq story, and that day the Iraq reporter subsidizes the supreme court reporter.

But this model is a problem for online journalism, because revenue is generated only from the articles that are actually read, and obviously, a single article generates less revenue than a complete package.

Unfortunately, this would make it very hard to keep reporters on the ground that slowly get to know their beats and wait for something interesting to happen. Unless media comes up with a new way to support regular beat reporters, we will lose the most essential information-gathering mechanism we have, and the news will be even more controlled by PR than it is today (and even today a large portion of the news is spoon-fed to the few reporters left by PR firms).