Boston Globe employees reject a 23% pay cut prompting its parent The New York Times Co to sound out buyers for the paper. Things don’t look good for the Boston Globe.

And the same is true of many UK newspapers. Without the largesse of their investors, the Independent and Evening Standard would cease to print. But should we care if that happened? There’d be less news but we’d almost certainly be no less well informed.

The FT’s Chrystia Freeland’s interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt of a couple of weeks back told us nothing new: newsgathering and profit making don’t mix too well. Schmidt’s view is technology was always destined to challenge the structure of newspapers. He also told Chrystia he doesn’t want to buy a newspaper.

If not Google and the other online news portals, who is willing to pay for news gathering? Will it have to be state-funded and or performed by enthusiastic amateurs? News Corp’s launch of Fox Nation, a right wing version of the HuffPo, suggests the future of news lies with aggregators. But (curiously?) its sister company The Sunday Times has gone the way of introducing a pay wall. Charging consumers for something they’ve grown used to having for free looks desperate.

What the future of news is – by whom, paid for by what, how much do we need – looks too difficult for amateurs like me to fathom. But some things we can probably take as given: we’ll have less news sources, depend less on professional journalism and more on enthusiastic amateurs.