Did Blogs kill newspapers?

Computerworld's Dan Tynan wonders. http://blogs.computerworld.com/blogosphere_newspapers

In the great food chain of news reporting, daily newspapers are like plankton -- the thing on which everything else feeds. TV and radio news? Aside from covering staged events or natural disasters, they get many of their stories from papers, then distill it into the bare essentials for broadcast. Magazine editors may be reluctant to admit this, but many articles are "inspired" by stories in the paper. And blogs? Don't get me started. I'd guesstimate a fraction of one percent of blogs feature original reporting; the rest regurgitate news from the mainstream media, mostly newspapers.
If daily newspapers disappeared tomorrow, 100 million bloggers would wake up and have nothing to say. Even the news aggregators would be in deep kimshee. For example, easily 75 percent of the stories on the front page of today's Drudge Report are from newspapers or the wire services that supply newspapers.

I don't think blogs, per se, killed newspapers, but I do think the Internet has.

When TV came out there was widespread belief that the new media would kill off newspapers. It didn't of course, largely because they are complementary media, really. What TV does well, newspaper can't do. But newspaper can do far more than TV can, because TV is enslaved by the need for images and, frankly, most news stories don't have good images.

On the other hand, the Internet is directly competitive to both TV and newspapers. It can do both about as well as either can, and has the advantage of being able to incorporate the best of the other medium directly into the same platform. Got great video to go with your story. Embed YouTube. Got a need to cover a word-heavy story? Internet can not just have the story, but ti can include links to primary documents.

Blogs, themselves, are just a small part of the problem. The news aggregating sites are the largest part. What they will do once the newspapers disappear is a very good question, though.