In May, I did a blog entry on Warren Buffett saying newspapers have not future and will go the way of the horse and buggy. The earlier this month, I did an entry looking at whether high end journalism could survive with cost cuts, sackings, newspapers closing down and little investment in training.

Now we have Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired saying that newspapers aren't important anymore, that he gets his news off Twitter and that journalism might end up being a hobby.

In an interview with Spiegel , Anderson says he wouldn't miss his local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle if it shut tomorrow.

How then does he stay informed? "It comes to me in many ways: via Twitter, it shows up in my inbox, it shows up in my RSS feed, through conversations. I don't go out looking for it ... I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don't go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it's just that it's not like this drumbeat of bad news. It's news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it's been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn't matter is not going to get to me."

He says newspapers are not important. Their physical, printed form no longer works but the process of compiling and analyzing information is still important.

And that, he says, will change journalism. "In the past, the media was a full-time job.'' Anderson says. "But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money."

The business model for news gathering will also have to change. "I think we will discover that whatever the business model of the 20th century was, it will be different in the 21st. Maybe we realize that selling ads is not the business we're in. Maybe we're into selling online content to audiences, or in creating communities or into selling events — in a similar way to which parts of the music industry is making money from concerts. Maybe companies that were built around the old business model will go away and other companies will come up, in much the same way as old record industry labels may disappear but the Apples of the world, with their iPods and iPhones, will continue to do well."

The model will definitely change. But no one yet knows exactly how and there are no answers from Anderson. We are in for years of experimentation. Some of it might be successful but there will be failures along the way.