Cory Doctorow explains:
The experiment that we are presently conducting as a society is aimed at discovering what kind of information and transactions are really and truly "newspaper material" and not material that we stuffed into the margins of a newspaper because we needed it and newspapers were the only game in town. It may be that there's nothing left when we're done, that there's a better way of delivering every word and every picture in the newspaper than to print it on broadsheet and fold it in eighths, in which case, newspapers may die, or they may end up being the territory of newspaper re-enactors, the equivalent of hobbyists who knap their own flint or re-enact the Battle of 1066.
Or it may be that newspapers do have a small and important and moving clutch of information and stories and images that really, really are better on paper.
Maybe the audience for that will be too small and specialized to support a large business, and maybe the audience will club together and treat newspaper like a charity, the way that opera (another medium that lost a lot of its stories to more popular and hence cheaper successor media) functions today. Or maybe the cost of producing a paper will dip so low that we won't particularly need a business to support it (Clay Shirky: "Will we still read the New York Times on paper in the future? Sure, if we print it out before reading it"). Or maybe there is a large and substantial and popular insoluble lump of newspaperstuff that no successor medium is better at hosting, a critical mass of popular material that sustains newspapers in a diminished but substantial niche, perhaps like vinyl records.