yep you're absolutely right. the value in journalism and journalistic output was based on the scarcity, i.e. the cost of publishing reduced the amount of available content. With web the costs were obliterated so the content exploded and the value of any individual piece dropped to essentially zero. When it's worth zero your revenues are zero and zero revenues you can't really pay for any journalism.

So then you have no choice but to seek alternative revenue streams (ads, data mining) and in fact this becomes the thing, since the original thing no longer produces a revenue.