American life after newsapers

In the New Yorker, Eric Alterman has a thoughtful and depressing essay on the decline of newspapers in the U.S. Describing the Huffington Post-style sites that are usurping newspapers, Alterman writes

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of "news"--and each with its own set of "truths" upon which to base debate and discussion--will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of "facts" by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly "red" or "blue."