To paraphrase Whet Moser in The Reader last week, it’s dumb, buying a newspaper today. All you get is a logo, a URL and an IOU. Only thing dumber, maybe, is being a newspaper today. When not Twitterifying word counts or delegating the Final Say to Athens, GA (Creative Loafing is based there), many papers are flat-out disappearing.

This week, for example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced its plans to go Internet-only and lay off staff, bringing the two-daily-paper city count down to … two? (Having grown up in Seattle, I will say that the Seattle Times totally has better comics. But that’s not the point.)

As Clay Shirky wrote on his blog, laser-nimbly per usual, the old publishing model is broken. And since it no longer needs to solve the problem it fixed in the first place – giving the public facile, affordable access to news – an entirely new system needs to be built.

So we should focus on doing that, argues Shirky smartly, instead of pissing and mewling over what’s lost (although Kachingle might not be such a bad way to prolong the death rattle). Today’s energy should go forwards and experimentally, as everything new is de facto scary, and nobody knows who Aldus Manutius Deux’s going to be. “Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Shirky writes firmly, if maybe a little wistfully. “What we need is journalism.” Right on, and notably so.

One thing: “journalism” doesn’t just mean snappy, savvy articles. It means you can write ‘em with at least a smidgin-chance at financial stability (it’s hard to critique and amplify when you’re cold and eating only Insta Mac-n-Chz … forever) and a mentor. And most importantly, it means you can read them without paying out the nose for dialup or waiting three hours for one of two library computers. Really, guys. Three hours. I’ve done it. If you can’t read it in the first place, doesn’t matter how good it is.