From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-01-12:
"How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will. At present about 80 percent of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers, according to John Carroll's estimate, and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily. Moreover, corporations like Google and Yahoo apparently have no interest in going into serious journalism....
"At present the Internet is basically an electronic version of the ten-year-old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device."
-- Russell Baker
(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)
[Note that there are in fact some web-based enterprises trying to fill the reporting gap.]