I don't think that the problem is this adverse. From what I've read into the posting on Slashdot, TPJ is still running well on the financial side, even without the infrastructure of Earthweb. This means that, after all the juridical hassles (like Earthweb wanting to keep the TPJ name and domain(s) and customer data), there will be most likely the nTPJ or TPJ-NG (or even TPJ-Lazarus), run by the same people as TPJ-Original.

Of course, this tells a lot about EarthWeb, but I guess it will only hinder the progress of TPJ, not stop it. As the success story of TPJ tells us, people still want reprints of the first 20 issues, so the quality of TPJ is mostly undebated - which will be a selling point when starting the next generation.