Michael Oreskes, then executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, gave the keynote on the second day of the Online News Association conference in Toronto in October 2007. His thesis, as summarised here, ran in three steps: quality journalism is good for society, it helps create a democratic society, and a democratic society builds wealth.
The notes taken from the talk record three points. Journalists can help audiences deal with information overload, and the proliferation of sources online increases the need for them at the same time as it undercuts the business model that pays for them. Journalists must not become conveyor belts of information; the job is to observe independently, then study and interpret what audiences have no time to. And journalism has to be reinvented in a form that keeps the traditional values of the profession while surviving in a new media age.
The page carried no write-up beyond those notes. Its argument was the one in the title, made by a newspaper editor to a room of online journalists at the point when the two groups were still treated as separate professions.