It's a laugh reading the papers here. All the articles are, xxx said x xxx xxx. No analysis or hard-hitting journalism, save possibly for some mild investigative journalism.

For that purpose, the freedom loving far rights have moved to online blogging and journalism (much to the chagrin of the ruling party). Some of them is pay-for-access, while others are free. These are 2 extremes where both are equally biased in opposite directions.

I think Rich is right, the need is for unbiased journalism rather than newspapers that don't report anything truly useful for the nation.

This is why some of the best, and hard hitting journalism out of the mainstream media has come from NPR and PBS, which is largely government funded.

I don't think newspapers should hold the space in the freemarket as the snuggie. If only the newspaper companies were banks, then they might be too big to fail.

Newspapers can either innovate, consolidate or fail. There will always be a need for quality journalism. It's only a matter of how that journalism gets distributed and who ends up being the distributor.

I am not so sure a universal news tax is bad idea. Studies show that nations with high newspaper readership have lower levels of corruption in the government. We may look upon the failing newspapers and say “I told you so” for not embracing the internet, but these are the people with the news bureaus, the people on the ground collecting and reporting the news. Without them, we may end up in a dark place, and I certainly would not rely on the drugereport or digg to deliver what actually matters to me.

What is Nu.nl going to aggregated when there is no content left. State sponsored press releases? With no profitable bureaus to investigate the people who want to deliver their 'version' of the news to us, we might as well just stick out heads in the sand.