We’ve been hearing about the American press’ survival crisis for quite a while now. Amid assertions that “journalism is dying,” various publications have refocused their mission or resorted to paywalls. Today in the Wall Street Journal, Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger makes the case for a different kind of solution: government involvement.

Ink-stained wretches, it’s not just you! The social media and Twitter elite fret about the future of journalism too — and wonder how it will survive the digital revolution. At SXSWi, there was no shortage of panels obsessively deconstructing this topic (and tweeting about it, natch).

This is what budget cuts look like in the extreme. The Washington Post has just announced that it will be closing its news bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to save costs. In a memo to staff, WaPo leadesrhip says it will maintain its commitment to national news, but frankly, with three major bureaus closing, it’s hard to see how.

In yet another Future of the News discussion, it would be far too easy to retread the same tired information. But with leaders in three separate media branches — including Dan Rather and the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer — at his disposal, moderator Victor Navasky didn’t limit the agenda for the evening. Instead, he kept it open-ended and tried to address the question of the evening: What’s in store for the future of media?