The problem isn't so much competition from Flick and facebook as it is Craigslist stealing all the classified ad revenue. And the fact that people don't like paying to read things on the web.
First one to crack a business model where they can send out reporters a-la the NYT but without the overhead of running a full fledged newspaper is going to hit it big time.
Oh, and about that secret CIA prisons thing, that was actually leaked by someone inside to a reporter, it could have been leaked on the web just the same.
Top news reporters have vast networks of sources that help them dig up that sort of information. That particular story may have leaked one way or another, but without well-connected journalists, many of the leaked stories we read would never be told, or would be lost among the thousands of rumors and innuendos published on blogs daily.
There are very few web-only sources that get quality leaks. It's fairly common for a website to break a story that the big dogs passed on, then to have it take off, but to actually get the information before the MSM is fairly rare.
The problem is that 80% of the news newspapers sell are commodities. Go to news.google.com and you get 10 articles from different papers on the same subject.
90% of people will not pay anything to read the 10% of investigative stories.