Sree Sreenivasan is a professor and Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia Journalism School and contributing editor at DNAinfo.com.

Ask a journalist about the state of the media and the answer you get may range from dire predictions about  journalism’s imminent demise to cautious optimism. The doomsayers point to falling newspaper circulation, fragmenting TV audiences and the 18,000+ jobs lost in 2009. Sites like PaperCuts, which painstakingly tracked those job losses (and has already noted 815 losses for January of 2010), and Twitter feeds like TheMediaIsDying, help reinforce the notion that the American media is, well, dying.

For the optimists, this ...

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