"So what?"

The moral of the story is -- journalists need to make their products useful to audiences "if they want to make money." After all, usefulness is highly correlated with value, and value is what makes [most] people pay.

In other words, while journalism may be important because it "contributes to the functioning of democracy and encourages civic engagement, etc.," the million dollar question is:  are these reasons enough to make people pay? Picard doesn't think so, and a closer look at average Americans' [un]willingness to pay for the news would suggest as much.

In my view, the more important, or practical question that journalists need to answer is the "so what?" from audiences: "so what if journalism facilitates democracy? What is in it for me? Why should "I" pay?"

Looking back in history, the U.S. has rarely been a nation with high political participation rate - many citizens don't cast votes during elections, and even among those who do vote many are neither politically informed nor civically engaged. In other words, while most people would agree that democracy is good and important (an argument journalists and journalism scholars alike often make in justifying the importance and value of journalism), many actually don't do much, if at all, to uphold this normative belief, let alone be willing to pay for it... 

There comes a time when idealism [must] collide with reality for survival -- in journalism such collision is not new or surprising, but when will journalists stop hiding behind the motto "the public should read and pay for our paper because it's good for democracy" and start looking for answers to "so what?" Soon, we hope.