Jeff Jarvis and others have been discussing the analogy of newspapers as mainframe computers. In essence, they are analagous: mainframes represented centralized processing, distribution and control. PC’s came along and blew that up. Mainframes still exist, but are being replaced by clusters of smaller, generally clustered linux computers. The migration continues to ever smaller network devices.

There is another analogy: Newspapers as legacy media. I recall discussing this last fall with Jay Rosen at Bloggercon. The software business uses the term legacy to describe mothballed code, or something that is no longer updated. Generally, this term is used when a customer is moving from software product/platform a to product/platform b (DOS to Windows, Unix to Linux, terminals to client/server to web services).

There will always be journalism, some great, some not so great. It will simply be delivered many different ways.