Last week has given us cause to reflect on what the news media actually is, or ought to be, and why we care about it so much. First, there were the latest swathe of government attacks on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - a perennial in Australian politics, which is not to say they shouldn't be taken seriously.

Secondly there was the announcement that Graeme Wood, the Wotif founder, is abandoning his philanthropic support for The Global Mail,which he helped found with a promise of at least $15 million (not all of which was delivered) less than two years ago.

Both the fact that the ABC survives, despite a history of attacks from governments of both colours, and the fact that someone like Wood founded The Global Mail, suggest that news media matters for reasons other than its commercial strength.

When the Australian Broadcasting Commission was founded it was a time of other great nation-building government commissions, covering railways, irrigation and, later, airlines. The other commissions have faded away. The ABC continues, and despite current tensions there is no serious sign that it will be abolished or privatised. It is too popular, too central to the life of the nation.

The provision of reliable news and information is still an activity in which most Australians implicitly accept a role for taxpayer funding.

What about philanthropy? In Australia, Wood is the only millionaire to have contributed big dollars to journalism, but in the USA and to a lesser extent Europe, philanthropy has become a major part of the journalistic landscape. There are estimated to be over 60 philanthropically funded journalism enterprises in the USA, with ProPublica probably the best known. ProPublica collaborates with commercial media organisations, and has become one of the nation's leading providers of investigative journalism.

Why? There is plenty of evidence that the sharing of news and information is not just a commercial activity. Every human society ever studied has had a means of transmitting news, and history tells us that the role of the professional messenger arises whenever communities grow too large or complex to be able to know themselves by word of mouth alone.

The way history has worked out in the western world is that the public role of news sharing has been largely performed by commercial enterprises. This was made possible by the binding together of two businesses - information and advertising - in the physical manufactured artifact of the newspaper.

Later, licensed access to limited broadcasting spectrum extended that model to the airwaves.

We are now entering the post industrial age, and the physical artifacts no longer bind the business and the public purpose together in the same way. Classified advertising, in particular, is now completely separate from journalism. Who buys a newspaper these days, when they want to find a house, a car or a job?

The business models that made news media profitable are broken, or under profound strain. AThis is the case despite the fact that we still want news and information. There is no evidence at all that we want it any less. Rather the reverse.

As a society, we are in the middle of working out what these changes mean, and how we will deal with the implications.

What about philanthropy? In the USA, the big philanthropic foundations stepped in about seven years ago, when in a great shakeout of failing business models meant many journalists were made redundant and many communities lost their news services.

But most philanthropists want to seed new things or answer crises. They don't want to be the media in the long term - and across the USA the many charitably funded newsrooms are all under pressure to diversity their funding sources and seek a way towards sustainability.

Graeme Wood, it seems, has a particular interest in media - witness his investment on the Guardian in Australia. But one man cannot be a long term solution to the crisis of media business models. In the future, philanthropy may answer the call in situations of particular need, but it won't be a complete answer to the post-industrial news landscape.

There are experiments with other models such as the Public Interest Journalism Foundation's nascent channel on the Pozible crowdfunding site.

New Matilda limps on, funded by its community of like-minded readers.

More robustly, all kinds of institutions and NGO's are doing journalism. Universities, in particular, are beginning to practice journalism, either through third party organisations such as The Conversation or directly.

These sorts of ventures, I suspect, will be long lasting and will grow. In the modern world, any organisation of size is in some sense a media organisation. Those with a public purpose will need to engage in elements of journalism practice.

Meanwhile, there are some things that citizens can do for themselves - including sharing opinions, analysis and sometimes news through social media.

Commercial media will adjust to the post industrial world, in which a cottage industry of independent producers will play its part. There will be many small enterprises and a few large ones, but the profit margins for news media will remain modest.

There will be gaps, and we will have to work out how to fill them.

In the meantime, while all this is worked out, there is a great risk that the undoubted need for shared sources of reliable information will be lacking.

The fact that we haven't yet arrived at a solution to the problems means that the justification for taxpayer funded media is probably stronger now than at any time since the ABC was founded.

Perhaps in 20 years time, this will not be the case. Certainly the landscape will be profoundly different, and we will be in an era of media plenty. But at the moment, the ABC represents both a safety net and a means of experimentation and innovation in news sharing, free from commercial pressure.

We need these things right now, more than ever.

Margaret Simons is an academic, freelance journalist and author. Declaration: The author was a founder of the PIJF, and remains on the Board.