Every conference of communication academics this summer (and, granted, for the last several years) has been abuzz with papers and panel discussions more or less asking the same questions explicitly: What is journalism now? What is mass communication now or does it even still exist? and What should journalism education consist of now? The implicit question, the one not asked outloud, is whether journalism education still matters. I don't know about you, but all of this is getting rather tedious and largely counterproductive, whether it is coming from an editor-turned-academic who thinks his long-time profession/industry is drying up before his eyes, or whether it is coming from a hardcore academic who wants to problematize everything and insist that there are no answers right now about anything, only questions. To me, much of this is hysteria reminiscent of all previous periods of technological innovation in communication. Many communication professors seem to need reminding right now, if they ever learned it at all in academic programs that have minimized or eliminated media history from their curricula, that the legitimate theaters mostly thought that movies were going to bankrupt them even more than usual. Surely Western Union's telegraph business thought it was going to be killed by the telephone (Western Union survived that) and the Internet (maybe it was, but the last telegram wasn't sent until February 2006). The radio industry mostly thought that television was going to put it out of business. Broadcast television thought that cable TV was going to put it out of business; broadcasters have even fought Federal Communications Commission regulations, to use only one possible example, as if American viewers choose TV shows to watch based on how many indecent words they can hear per hour. Broadcast and cable TV have both been nervous about the Internet. And, of course, the newspaper industry generally has thought that radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the Internet, each and all, were going to put it out of business. (The magazine industry apparently has mostly flown under the radar, neither another medium's target nor insecure about its own value and quality.) I don't know whether bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the United States Post Office (now Postal Service) thought they were going to be put out of business by first the telegraph and then the telephone. Other than parcels and periodicals, it certainly would not have been a ridiculous thought. But the Postal Service seems to have done rather nicely until relatively recently hit by the critical mass combining fax, e-mail, overnight mail, cell phones, and years of slow U.S. economic growth followed by the Great Recession. (Memo to junk-mailers: You may still send letters to people who you can't call because of Do Not Call lists. That should help.) The case of the newspaper industry is particularly instructive (and painful) with regard to Chicken Little reactions. The general pattern is that many U.S. newspaper employees have been especially willing, even eager, to be fatalistic about their employers, their profession, and their entire industry, each time a new communication technology comes along. (Oswald Garrison Villard wrote the book, The Disappearing Daily: Chapters in American Newspaper Evolution.... in 1944. Carl E. Lindstrom wrote the book, The Fading American Newspaper.... in 1964!) But, voila, the U.S. newspaper industry survives it. And then another communication technology (such as the Internet) comes along, and those newspaper employees who don't remember Chicken Little's last appearance prepare for the fryer again while those who do remember murmur, time is different. (There's a recent book on that: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Sean Pratt; someone could/should write This Time Is Different: Eight Decades of Newspaper Journalists' Folly.) But the facts are not just that the U. …