Spiceworks for IT professionals is also a hint of things to come

The immediate response is to blame the Internet (with its aggregation services and search engines) and the second is to engage in special pleading (where only print can support 'real' journalism and without it there won't be an informed public, democracy will suffer and the world will end).

These concerns can end up with governments effectively subsidising failing business models to preserve journalism as a sort of public palliative for disruptive change (as might occur in the UK if Lord Carter's Digital Britain report is ever acted upon).

But of course as the Internet changes the possibilities, journalism as we know it will simply be displaced (perhaps transformed) and will return in a new guise.

The problem is that while the awful creative destruction is taking place it's often not possible to see the process for what it is. Anyone who is interested in this issue might find this essay (it's more than a blog, less than a book) by Clay Shirky enlightening.

Shirky points out that when an institution or business model is under threat from the Internet, people understandably demand to know "but what will replace it?". This is often unanswerable because the destruction must typically happen before the replacement evolves.

But sometimes there's a hint. Sometimes you can catch sight of the new applicant.

Which is why Spiceworks is interesting. If you're in IT you might already know all about Spiceworks (http://www.spiceworks.com/). Nothing to do with girl-power, this is IT manager power. It's an online community site where IT professionals can exchange information, make contacts, find jobs... nothing unusual there.

But the key to Spiceworks is that it used a free IT management application as the draw and, because the give-away enabled it to get to scale quite quickly, it had the numbers to do the 'media' side of the business itself.

According to its Jay Hallberg, Spiceworks co-founder and VP of Marketing, in the early 2000s he and his partners worked in the enterprise space on network management and were "stunned at how fragmented the market was for management tools," he says.

"Actually we started with an open-source idea at first," but when it came to pricing the product it became apparent that any price was capable of being undercut by a competitor. "Sure we could have charged $69.00 for our application instead of $2000," he says, but their calculations told them someone else could have undercut them at $29.00. "We decided to go for a media play and go to zero [with a free software offer] straight away," says Hallberg.

As a result the site and the business boomed and Spiceworks now has a  global membership of over 500,000 and describes itself as the world's largest free IT management software company.

In the end, instead of using Google to pepper a few 'targeted' ads onto its pages, it decided to hand-craft the advertising and sponsorship side of the business itself, doing it's own ad sales and forming high level relationships with the big IT clients who wanted access to its huge membership base to sell them things like PCs, routers and servers.

"We used [Google's] Adsense to start with but HP came to us and said we had a really valuable property. So we decided to sell our own ads," says Hallberg.

So while Spiceworks is part media part community site, it's also part software company and (given that it's dealing with IT professionals) chooses to frame its integrated offer pulling together application, community and media features, as a software product.

And it naturally does versions. Its latest move is the launch of Spiceworks 4.0 which, amongst many things, offers "more support for Managed Service Providers and localisation covering 19 international languages". It also boasts API functionality so plug-ins and widgets are on the horizon, as is integration with Twitter. And it does some of the important things a trade publication's editorial does too - it provide white papers, product reviews and independent comment, for instance.

So Spiceworks is one example of the way publications might reformulate online. And it even includes journalism, just not as we know it.