>>60 minutes did a story on the loss of the newspapers. It is tragic because most online news sources just regurgitate the stuff from many newspapers and television news feeds. The newspapers spend the $ to do the research, do the followup calls, make sure the information is valid, etc. Most online sources just paraphrase what was already done. Local news may be the next to go. The sad thing is that those who only ever got their news online, won't even know what they are missing.
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>Even those papers that maintain an online presence after the physical papers are gone (like the Seattle PI) will still suffer because of staff cutbacks. I wonder if they will still be able to do the same amount of research necessary to post a valid story.

I think the staff cutbacks came first. The investigative journalism died far before the newspapers themselves. Just like it happened with pretty much anything else, few big players in the field remain, who can afford (but actually don't) to have enough staff and keep a reporter on a hot trail, even if he churns only two articles a week.

It would be interesting to compare the number of articles from abroad, written by "our correspondent" vs those written by freelancers and/or just taken from agencies, over a couple of decades. My hunch is that the decline is older than Internet.