Not so long ago, some of the prophets of new media were heralding the advent of a digital utopia in which print journalism would be replaced by free online news, established news outlets would be usurped by startups and professional journalists would be overrun by a corps of amateur reporters and bloggers.

This future, they told us, was not only inevitable, it represented a democratization of the news itself, and to fight it was to be a Luddite or a reactionary.

Back in 2008 and '09, when the recession was crashing through the news business like a tsunami, few argued with this received wisdom.

But some are starting to question these prophets. It's not just that some of their predictions have proven to be wrong; it's that a growing number of thoughtful observers are pushing back against the very foundations of their thinking.

For example:

The Death of Print Journalism: This was the cornerstone of the new digital utopia. The expensive old tech of newspapers - tree-cutting, paper-making and printing presses - would be replaced by the web and vastly more efficient digital delivery systems, the prophets said.

But a recent headline in The Economist said it all: "Whatever happened to the death of newspapers?" It turns out that newspapers worldwide remain reasonably healthy, and as The Economist pointed out, U.S. papers are finding a better balance between revenue from circulation and advertising and are returning to profitability in the process - not the hefty margins of years ago, but profits nonetheless.

And even in the Internet age, the lion's share of newspaper revenue (typically 80-90 percent) comes from printed display advertising. As long as that's the case, newspapers, of which there are still roughly 1,300 in the U.S., aren't about to abandon newsprint.

Free Online News: The digital utopia the prophets envisioned was based on the mantra "information wants to be free." The idea was that news websites would make truckloads of cash from online advertising, thus enabling them to give away their content. In the primordial ooze of the Internet era, most newspaper companies bought into this thinking.

But online advertising revenue has landed with a giant thud (typically it isn't enough to support even a tiny news operation.) So more and more news organizations (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and The New York Times among them) are implementing paywalls, despite admonitions from the prophets who say it won't work.

All of which has led thoughtful people in the media to ask a simple question: Why should news organizations give away their most valuable commodity - their content?

Douglas Rushkoff puts it well when he writes:

"In their effort to get on board the Internet and cooperate with the notion that information wants to be free, many newspapers have transformed what had been their most profitable assets into liabilities. What good is a global audience if nobody is paying?"

(At The Financial Times, where revenue from online subscriptions is growing by leaps and bounds, chief executive John Ridding tells the Los Angeles Times: "Some of the apostles of free — who were giving us a hard time three or four years ago when we started charging online — are no longer in business.")

Information may want to be free, but as former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw noted, "The most serious mistake we made at the beginning of the IT era... is that we allowed the young pioneers in that business and the users of it to proclaim to the world... that information is free. It is not free." Information doesn't fall from the sky; it has to be gathered, checked and curated, typically by reporters with training in the task. Which leads to my next point.

The End of the Establishment: In the minds of some media prophets, this was to be the final stage in the rise of the new digital utopia. Established news organizations would collapse under the weight of their own bureaucracies and be replaced by agile web startups run out of lofts and warehouses, and journalists trained in archaic skills like interviewing and fact-checking would find themselves left in the dust, either by legions of citizen reporters or by bright young things adept at designing web pages and editing digital video.

But as news consumers are discovering, good journalism more often than not comes from good journalists, experienced professionals who know what they're doing and are paid to do it by news organizations that can afford to support substantial newsrooms. In a column headlined "There's More to Being a Journalist Than Hitting the Publish Button," the aforementioned Rushkoff writes:

"Just because a kid now enjoys the typing skill and distribution network once exclusive to a professional journalist doesn't mean he knows how to research, report or write. It's as if a teenager who has played Guitar Hero got his hands on a real Stratocaster - and thinks he's ready for an arena show."

On the surface, there's nothing wrong any of this. Citizen journalism may indeed democratize newsgathering. Killing off newspapers would save a lot of trees. And who wouldn't want an endless supply of free online news? Change is inevitable, after all, and no doubt the news business as it exists today will look very different a few years hence.

But it seems clear now that many of the media prophets' forecasts were based as much on their own desires as on any compelling evidence, and that in reaching for journalism's future they devalued its past. In the name of efficiency they would gut the infrastructure that made an entire industry viable, and in the name of democratization they would sweep away standards, making news a valueless commodity to be given away. In the end, the prophets made it all-too clear what they thought journalism itself was worth.

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