Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone, compares the current media revolution with the first such event, the creation of the printing press. He cites Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as evidence that the change wrought by Gutenberg’s invention was not at all instantaneous. “The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks,” writes Shirky, “is, ‘How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?’”

The answer is chaos. Shirky says that old models fail before new schemes can fully replace them. It’s a good description of where we find ourselves now, carried along by a rapid current with no watercraft and no ability to avoid the rocks we can’t see beneath the foam. Ariana Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, an online aggregator of news content and a habitat for punditry, said “the future of news is going to be hybrid.”

We think the form matters but it doesn’t. The medium is the message. And we get the message any way it’s presented to us. In this media revolution, nonprofits, bloggers, individuals, amateurs are carrying the banner for a new journalism. The extent to which their stories are interesting, affect change and reform, and attract readers will help lead the way to new business models. That’s models, plural.

New media mogul and co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, suggests we need to alter our expectations of media, that in the future, “there can be high margin businesses” that provide the journalism we need, but their scope may no longer be in the billions.

There is still a paradox of value that is yet to be entirely worked through. We have been willing to pay for print products because they are tangible—a $26 book, a $3 Sunday paper, a $4.95 magazine — and less willing to pay for the intangible ether of the Internet.

That which we cannot touch and hold has a lower perceived value, which is perhaps how things got to be free on the Internet in the first place, along with the idea that once the hardware was set up, the cost of transmitting content was practically free compared to the costs of killing trees and moving the resulting product around by truck.

The missing piece, of course, is no one accounted for the cost of creating content. Steven Brill is right when he points out that we pay more for the lesser product—that the free Internet has more information, delivered and updated more quickly, and with more diverse features and capability to inform and entertain—and that this is illogical. It’s part of the chaos of the revolution.

Fortune magazine journalist, Josh Quittner cites Andreessen’s concern that media companies have been forced to become technology companies without the resources and temperament of such firms. Technology firms thrive on change and disruption and adapt accordingly.

“Microsoft is going through this right now,” Andreessen points out, “[CEO Steve] Ballmer is not complaining about it.”

Human beings have a profound need and ability to communicate, whether or not anyone is paying for it. From the oral tradition through the mass dissemination of the printed word and the broadcast of sound and images, technology has been the servant of this innate quality, the need to share coupled with the need to know. “Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Shirky says, “What we need is journalism.”

A just society and a working democracy need it, too. The Internet and all the distribution platforms that have sprouted in the wake of Old Media serve as conduits to satisfy the demand for knowledge and news that can and will support this need.

Victims of injustice and those wronged or aggrieved by government, corporations or their fellow man, will always seek the tools of journalism to expand the scope of their grievance into the public forum.

Someone who gets screwed will lead the charge and journalism, like the ghost of Tom Joad, will be there. Print media vehicles as we know them may become historic oddities but the information and service they provide are a definitional part of human existence. And where there is demand, there is a market, an economy, a way to fund the necessary works of democracy and a society that continues to strive for a more perfect balance between individual happiness and the common good.