The Reconstruction of American Journalism, a report published this week by Leonard Downie, a former Washington Post editor, and Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism professor, came at an opportune time. On Monday, the New York Times announced it would buy out or sack 100 of its 1,200 newsroom employees by the end of the year. As US newspapers go, that is getting off easy. Some venerable papers, such as the Boston Globe, have lost about half their news employees.

For all the routine complaints, the commercialisation of news in the 20th century was one of the best things that ever happened to newspapers. Anyone with a product to market paid a kind of public-information tax, through newspaper advertising. But news and advertising came unlinked as they migrated to cyberspace. Online revenues are not big enough to permit old-style news gathering. The consequences will be dire and they are as yet mostly invisible. The internet is still exploiting the human and physical capital built up in the old-media economy. That capital will not be renewed in coming generations.