Right now, there are too many journalists doing essentially the same thing. Look at news conferences and media events with their microphone bushes and rows of video cameras and reporters. Waste.

The Internet is an organism that prunes waste. It finds the best providers of something and rewards them, but it ruthlessly rids itself of those who duplicate uselessly.

Back 20 years ago, you needed multiple newspapers and many stations, etc. Today, we only need one. I’m only going to read one, maybe two stories on a subject, not dozens. But yet, dozens of reporters show up. I don’t think we are seeing an industry dying. What we are seeing is one that is being ruthlessly pruned of duplication and waste.

Newspapers are not expensive to produce. In fact, even with the cost of people, newsprint, delivery fuel, etc., etc., the per-paper cost is still relatively small. I’m going to guess that circulation revenue comes close to covering the nut. Well managed operations can still make a vast piles of money.

I believe the underlying problem is that each new generation in the United States READS less then the previous one. Not just newspapers, but magazines, books — yes, even Internet pages. More and more people USE the Internet, sure, but most people don’t READ on the Internet.

We are raising generations of observers who want to be entertained by the mass media, not informed by it. They want to WATCH non-sensical content like “American Idol” and most of what passes for programming on YouTube.

READING requires effort. People in the U.S. just don’t want to be bothered.

Of course it is easy to agree on the necessity of moving “beyond”, that is: beyond ways of thinking that reify the existing ways of doing things, that function to solidify entrenched loyalties to routines and practices that served traditional models and relationships (between owners, editors, reporters, sources, advertisers and audiences) so well.

And yes, the key to the “new” mixed media ecology is starting from the basic premise that all those roles and players are still here, but that they are converging, mixing, becoming more fluid or liquid.

That also means that new business models cannot be premised on a notion of structural stability. We need to embrace liquidity as the foundation for moving beyond.

That said, we cannot forget that all these news and media companies to a large extent are not just governed by journalists or owners or advertisers, but also by investors and stockholders – and THAT is a system that seems particularly locked into a 19th century industrial-capitalist way of thinking (with a fixation on growth and increasing R-O-I).

I am not anti-capitalism, but as someone smarter than me said to me recently: why are we never critically discussing the underlying issue determining most of our concerns about the survival of quality and creativity in media work: capitalism (more specifically: its dark side).