What's next after your broadsheet's gone?

I like this blog post that looks at what happens after a daily paper shuts down in the US. Basically, no one will miss it, because the rest of the media ecosystem will pick up on what it was doing. What's good are the replies to the blog, some of which I'll quote a little here:

"Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.

If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?

Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?

I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it."

and another:

"The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures"

another:

"People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.

Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times."