I have to say, I find it funny to be called an apologist for the legacy news industry, as Clay Shirky suggested in an overnight post.

Ask Steve Forbes or Lex Fenwick what they think about that, given my columns of just a few months ago. Or ask Aaron Kushner himself, who was none too happy when I published confidential financials from the company’s pitch deck to investors back in January — and exposed the fact that the company’s bare $6 million in cash pointed to deeper problems. Early on, when I began my Newsonomics analyst work, the daily press took pains to call me a pessimist for my realistic, journalistic take on my own industry.

I call ’em as I see ’em — the dunderheads and the dreamers, and all in between. My quest remains the same: finding new and more sustainable ways to pay good journalists to do their work. To that end, any ill-humored attempt at forensic psychiatry seems like wasted time. (Clay, I have to warn you that delving into the recesses of my mind and motivations can be a dangerous exercise. I’ve been there. A little Left Coast suggestion: Look inward, my friend.) Would it be useful or fair to malign Shirky for the market failures of Digital First Media, to which he has served as an advisor, as that company prepares to be parceled out and sold? I don’t think so.

I make no apology for my coverage. Could I have ramped up the skepticism 20 percent? Sure, and maybe I should have, but the balance of concern was there. (Voluminous detail for Shirky and anyone with too much time on their hands, below.) As I covered Kushner’s Orange County Register revolution — and let’s recall all of it has happened in less than two years — I figured better to give the guy his rope, even if ends up wrapping it around his neck in record time. Better to do that then deride him out of the gate as a clueless print lover and let it go at that. Within the Register model, wherever it goes from here, there were and are many good ideas. We’re journalists. We should separate the wheat from the chaff rather than throw out the whole harvest. To take one example, should we not have paid attention to Patch just because we had questions about its model?

Though Kushner’s recklessness now seems clear, as I detailed recently ( “The newsonomics of the Orange Country Register’s swerves all over the freeway,” June 4), there were plenty of speed bumps along the way, for anyone who took the time to read. Maybe it was the scene of the action — some 3,000 miles from the would-be epicenter of all news, Manhattan — that has something to with Shirky’s dyspeptic take.

In truth, the Register expansion was one of the biggest stories in the news business in the last two years. It represented both the largest hiring of daily journalists anywhere and served as a neat counterpoint to Advance’s day-slimming strategy. What some people miss in the Register staff hiring is that much of it simply replaced Register journalists who’d been lost in the Great Recession and bankruptcy. While papers like The Dallas Morning News and the Star Tribune, among others, did a much better job of holding on to their core newsrooms than others, the Register — in a top-20 market — had seen disproportionate staffing losses. At the beginning, the Register foray was a rebuilding — a solid business strategy — rather than empire-building.

More deeply, the digital-or-die argument just seems tired. Clearly we are moving toward a mainly digital and majority mobile world. The smartest publishers would love to throw the switch from print to digital and just be done with it. Costs are so much lower, likely profit margins so much higher, and the pain of transformation reduced. But 75 percent or more of the money flowing in to pay the journalists still come from print — and we know there is no digital business model yet able to pay for large local newsrooms. FiveThirtyEight and Vox maybe — The Miami Herald, Star Tribune, or Dallas Morning News, no.

So print matters, even if some would like to believe it shouldn’t. It has driven the revolution of reader revenue, and that’s a revolution important to all journalists worldwide. People, we now know, will pay for digital news, but for many that transactional leap starts with print. It may be an inconvenient fact for some worldviews, but it’s a fact nonetheless.

In light of the Register’s recent reverse course, Shirky isn’t the only one to point out that I’d covered the Kushner adventure more than most. He’s just the only one to take it personally and to have a public allergic reaction. I hope he recovers quickly; his sober voice is a useful one to us all.

I understand the value of cherry-picking quotes to reinforce a point. It’s a practice, though, that we learn is unfair in those journalism schools that Shirky also takes time to malign. (Good Dan Kennedy rebuttal on that black/white Shirky description.)

With 2015 — the midpoint of this decade — coming on fast, I say let’s move on and tackle the real issues and models.

In the meantime, a more balanced short compendium of my take on the Register would also show these admonitions: