I agree with Ebert's points, but I would put it differently: People who persist in reading newspapers are being trained not to think. There are fewer and fewer such people, because newspapers have long since abandoned the thinking person's market.
Fortunately, this isn't the early 1990s anymore. If I want to read (e.g.) Roger Ebert I don't need to force my local paper to carry him.
People still have a lot of respect for newspapers. For example, why are we allowed to talk about conspiracy theories on Hacker News when Roger Ebert writes about them in the paper, but not when they're on someone's blog?
Websites, of course. The real question is "What is supposed to replace advertising" because web advertising doesn't work very well. My guess: Rich non-media people like George Soros will bankroll news organizations. This already happens with some small political magazines.
Keep in mind that pornography is a 97 billion dollar international business. [1]. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, yes? And yet, one reader of Commentary magazine is worth a million listeners of Howard Stern.
Or maybe someone will come up with a way to target advertising to consumers in a way that doesn't suck, so you can make a living from a website with reasonable traffic. Adwords doesn't meet this criterion.
No, before the modern advertising industry it was very cheap to start a newspaper so they were mostly owned by small businesses. The advertising model made it more expensive to run a newspaper which is why the news industry got taken over by wealthy families and then later corporations.
I always thought Ebert was too lenient on movies (as he famously says, he goes to movies to enjoy them; I've always liked more critical film reviewers), but I've loved every article he's written for the Sun. It's made me appreciate his attitude a lot more.
In particular, his criticism for how the press handled Twilight. I lost my love for newspapers through 2006-2007 with their handling of the book series. If you haven't read them, the books are disgustingly bad; high schoolers have a better track record in terms of quality. And newspapers and "old media" never once referred to it. They'd focus only on the popularity and on the many people who liked it, which was a really self-serving story.
I really hope people start speaking up against that sort of news reporting. It's killing the news. And I think that old news is going to end up dead as the Internet gains prominent, but god - what an ugly death.
Newspapers no longer have monopoly on information, and since educated consumers are increasingly searching out alternative information sources on the web, newspapers have to concentrate on the casual reader. And the casual reader is interested in celebrity - it has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It's not making us dumb, humans have always wanted to know about their queens and aristocracy.
Challenging material, or material that only appeals to some upper crust 10% is going to move to a medium where only the 10% who are interested in it get to see it. A mass paper needs to appeal to the masses, this not only makes commercial sense, but it's logically right. If some guy has no interest in some massive review of a huge book written in big words he does not know, then why should this review be in his paper?
Being average is a good thing, and specialists should not complain that the average people are no longer interested in what they have to say. Instead, they should focus on the people who are actually interested in them.
I learnt about the incomming subprime crisis not from those newspapers. I was from economic blogs and it was more than a year ago. Dont you think newspapers have lost some of its usefullness, if they cant see these kind of events coming?
Or we're finding out how useless they were all along. The web allows us to dig for what -we- find important; -we- become the editors. And that will keep stupid people stupid, but allow smart people to become much smarter.
Fortunately, this isn't the early 1990s anymore. If I want to read (e.g.) Roger Ebert I don't need to force my local paper to carry him.