The cause of the crisis in newspapers is not a mystery. So why investigate it?

Excellent Kelly McParland column in the NatPost. Excerpt:
"It’s simple: new technology has made the existing business model less viable. People peer at laptops, cellphones and tablets, rather than printed pages. The news business can fill those screens just as easily as it fills newsprint. It just can’t generate as much revenue. Readers and advertisers won’t pay as much for news on screens as they did for news on paper. Which makes the existing order unaffordable.
"That’s it in a nutshell. You could royal commission your way across the country from now until a week next Christmas and it would still come down to that. Despite all its efforts, the print industry hasn’t figured out how to squeeze enough money out of the screen industry to support itself. Everyone is in the same boat and struggling mightily to find an answer.
"The news business won’t go away. If anything, the proliferation of digital news sites has increased the demand for “content” to fill them. Much of the 'content' now comes from those same newspapers that fear for their existence. Nimrods who squeal with delight at the potential disappearance of print publications that displease them fail to realize it’s the legacy, mainstream media that keeps feeding all those new web sites with most of the information, ideas and issues they regurgitate.
The whole column