Where are the ideas for newspapers?

Liberal critic Eric Alterman, long a voice of sanity among those observing the newspaper industry, weighs in on the Nation web site with some thoughts on the future of newspapers and the dearth of ideas coming from the industry. The nut sentence -- one well worth repeating -- is this: " The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper . . . is going to have to come from somewhere else." He correctly points out that newspapers are "the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy," begging the question of where all those web sites are going to get their information after they've killed off the last newspaper. Frankly, I don't see any ideas from that sector either. And, while I'm at it, few from academia.