“A government without newspapers is not an option for America, ” President Obama said last night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. “We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world [and] we look to you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation. This is the season of renewal and reinvention, which is what journalism is in the process of doing. It’s not short on talent or creativity or passion or creativity or commitment…qualities that certainly prove that journalism’s problems are worth solving.”

“The real question,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this morning, “is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

“It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

“By all means let’s mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let’s deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up.

“Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.”