Journalism has been talking about the future of journalism for fifty years or more. It is literally always the same answers, none of which are both feasible and realistic. All the problems boil down to this: journalism is a product, not a public utility. And the product isn't in the information category; it's in the entertainment category.
The author may really like "The Sting" but the movie was a rip-off of a book by David Maurer, and all of the con mechanisms in the movie were lifted without permission from his book. The theft was later settled privately for a huge sum.
Waiting for the inflection point that all social sites go through: When a social site's top content stops being about itself, then it is probably going to be successful.
A second corollary: When a social site's top content stops being about the internet, then it is probably going to be even more successful.
The 171,476 figure from OED is used inaccurately in a way that shows a gross misunderstanding of dictionaries and language. The number 171,476 refers to the number of full entries for words in “current use” as defined in the 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It does not represent words. It also does not include all the OED's variant spellings, inflected forms, phrases or run-ons (sub-entries derived from the main entries). Additionally, the OED is by no means a complete inventory of English. In fact, it's probably millions of words short, especially as it has an incredibly slow update cycle. Source: I am a dictionary editor and lexicographer, use OED daily, and know the people who make it.
"Almost across the board" is a damning statement, not a remark that supports careless deaccessioning. I work in the margins of my field, and literally thousands of books are unavailable to me through interlibrary loan. I have to buy them or fly to libraries around the world, at a cost of many thousands of dollars I do not have. (One of my colleagues was fortunate to get a large inheritance; they almost exclusively use it to acquire or travel to books they need for their subject.) And mine is not even an esoteric field, nor esoteric subject. It's just that too many books were deaccessioned on the baseless idea that someone else would surely have the book and make it available to scholars.