When business models change, a lot of the value propositions shift with them - and the people in the industry in question are often the last ones to see and accept the change. Richard Picard has an excellent piece exploring that idea with respect to reporting today in the CS Monitor:

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages.

This sort of thing is happening across other "news" businesses than media - consider the PR field. Up until fairly recently, corporate PR folks had the important task of getting the word out about their products to important sources in trade journals. Then two things happened with the rise of the net:

• General trade journals started to get beaten up, being replaced by niche publications working online (think of Engadget, for instance)
• The people responsible for creating technology got the ability to report on what they were doing themselves (blogs and social media)

Those changes not only cut the PR pro out of the loop, it eliminated the need for most of the people he was talking to as well. As Picard points out, that process has been happening across the media, and I'd argue that PR is pretty much a specialized media field. The net is relentlessly disintermediating things, and reporting is is just one example of that.

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