Steve Buttry has written the best take on why eliminating an entire photo department is a dreadful idea. Buttry makes his case based not on sentiment but on the role professional photographers will play in the future of digital storytelling.
This part is especially useful to those of us imagining how this everyone-has-a-camera world should work:
amateur or professional-multi-tasker photographs add to the volume and variety in a medium where visual content engages more effectively than words. We should use that content to free professional photojournalists from doing routine assignments and spend their time heavily, if not exclusively, in chronicling major breaking news stories and producing photo galleries, videos and interactive multimedia projects.
I’d love to hear about some newsrooms where a model like this is already working. If you know of any, please post in the comments below.
Meg Heckman 
Thanks for the kind words!
Thank YOU for the fantastic insight.