The second morning panel at the SIIA Industry Summit continued to explore the right path for old media. Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair columnist, founder of Newser and all-around conference provocateur, grabbed the question, “what is the best model for print media companies?” and ran with it, offering an extended riff on the woes of the New York Times and print in general. During the Q&A portion, after he pronounced the death of gated content and the usual revenue streams, audience members predictably pounced, asking who will pay for news magazines’ foreign bureaus and who will ultimately pay for aggregated content. Wolff refused to provide any cut-and-dried solutions, advising the people in the room to start coming up with one or get repeatedly out-foxed by the likes of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other non-media companies.

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—General print is dead: Wolff: “What’s the best model? It’s certainly not the NYT. Traditional media organizations, general interest print organizations are finished. They’re done. If this takes another week or a year or 18 months, this is inevitable. We are living in historic times. The question should be, How far do you have to move? You have to move all the way. Google has established a new model. They don’t create or pay for content. The thing we’ve built our businesses around, they don’t do. They have monopolized the primary revenue stream, which is advertising. The question is how can we pay less—or really, nothing at all—for content? Newser has no content costs. It’s mind-boggling that you can create a high caliber business with other people’s content. It’s all based on the fundamental notion that we are all connected to each other, we all link to each other.”

—Vivek Shah, group digital president, new business unit of Time Inc: Trying to lighten the mood a bit after Wolff’s grave assertions, Shah offered a basic recipe of what media companies must have in order to make the transition to digital. Still, he was also unable to provide a clear path out of the wilderness. “You need a great product, a quality audience and a way to make money. There are way too many people knocking on marketers’ doors asking them to fund product creation. News-gathering as a way to drive economic value is giving way to news analysis and commentary. On the internet, the advantage of having the news first doesn’t matter. Once the news hits, everyone has it. As you go from PC-based web to mobile, the advertising format shrinks.” Afterward, a Time Inc. rep emailed me to say that the company’s model is doing just fine. In addition to an average of 26 million monthly uniques across the publisher’s sites, as an example of one site’s growth plan, TIME.com’s revenue grew 107 percent in 2008.

—Oakleigh Thorne, co-president, Blumenstein/Thorne Information Partners: While other panelists just shook their heads. Thorne, who heads a PE firm said simply, “This is why I’m glad my company doesn’t depend on advertising.”