By Bob Gibson

    The year that ends in just 13 days has brought newspapers to their knees with many praying for new business models that can sustain and revive American journalism.

    A crashing business model once based upon booming retail and classified ads and monopolistic rates of revenue isn’t coming back. Ad revenue and readership dipped and dived at papers whose profitability plummeted and whose size, staff and stories shrank.

    Newsrooms at major papers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Cleveland, San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles are pale shadows of their former selves. Coverage of state and local governments throughout the country is diminished or disappearing.

    Yet, some of journalism’s leading lights are voicing optimism that the days of newsrooms producing the quality of journalism vital to the functioning of democracy and to informed electorates are far from over.

    Journalism is changing more than it is dying. Dominant newspapers and their broadcasting cousins, major television network news operations, are losing ground to upstarts and far more diverse collections of news gatherers as people design their own sets of free media.

    Collections of non-profits, public radio operations and collaborations among traditional news gatherers and newer journalistic enterprises are creatively stepping up to supplement or replace the dying monopolistic media.

    Len Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor of communication at Columbia University, have produced an upbeat report on how newer media can continue the traditions of what they call “accountability journalism” in this new age of .advocacy journalism. 

    Their report, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, discusses new collaborations starting up in the public interest around the country and recommends six steps to support diverse sources of independent news reporting.
The report is available online through the Journalism School at Columbia University:  http://www.columbiajournalismreport.org.

    In it, the authors discuss how larger newspapers battered by the recession are changing. Micropayments to read individual news stories through the Internet using a model of online digital music purchases and business-to-business arrangements to share in ad revenue from other sites that republish stories are two of the various proposals from Internet entrepreneurs playing around the margins of what readers now regard as free media on the web.

    They conclude that new digital technology combined with innovations and new reporting models can energize and expand possibilities for good reporting. Online journalists, non-profit entities and new collaborations among groups of newsrooms, such as the eight largest newspapers in Ohio pooling and sharing stories, are giving consumers of news fresh reporting and the ability to participate in journalism through multimedia sites, blogs, social networks, podcasts and videos.

    Newsrooms and non-profits alike are finding new partners in a media dance that speeds up the pace of news while allowing for reporting on multiple platforms.
    In Charlottesville, The Daily Progress is four months into a partnership with Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that covers land-use, growth and transportation issues in the city and Albemarle County with a full-time staff of two journalists and some University of Virginia interns. The newspaper and the non-profit both appear to benefit from sharing news on important issues. Stories and podcasts are distributed through the CvilleTomorrow.org Web site as well as through e-mail and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and a new Wiki known as Cvillepedia.org.

    Critics of the nonprofit could consider it more advocacy journalism than accountability journalism.

    Downie and Schudson propose half a dozen ways to further support independent news reporting. They include:

1. The Internal Revenue Service or Congress should explicitly authorize any independent news organization substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs to be created as or converted into a nonprofit entity or a low-profit Limited Liability Corporation serving the public interest, regardless of its mix of financial support, including commercial sponsorship and advertising. The IRS or Congress also should explicitly authorize program-related investments by philanthropic foundations in these hybrid news organizations—and in designated public service news reporting by for-profit news organizations.

2. Philanthropists, foundations, and community foundations should substantially increase their support for news organizations that have demonstrated a substantial commitment to public affairs and accountability reporting.

3. Public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting, and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country.

4. Universities, both public and private, should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject, and accountability news reporting as part of their educational missions. They should operate their own news organizations, host platforms for other nonprofit news and investigative reporting organizations, provide faculty positions for active individual journalists, and be laboratories for digital innovation in the gathering and sharing of news and information.

5. A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and which would be administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.

6. More should be done—by journalists, nonprofit organizations and governments—to increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments, to facilitate the gathering and dissemination of public information by citizens, and to expand public recognition of the many sources of relevant reporting.

    Some of the above may involve more government assistance than is likely, but the emphasis on mixing and matching new forms of collaboration demonstrates ways to enter the new year with a little more optimism about enhancing support for accountability journalism. Many Americans would object to further government subsidies of, or tax breaks for, any kind of media.

    Advocacy journalism is alive and flourishing, but the old-fashioned newsroom’s brand of holding individuals and governments accountable through honest, even-handed and diligent reporting of the news is an established value worth holding onto in a new media age. Let’s hope some can make a profit doing it right and others can do it with citizens and non-profits leading the way to new models of informing people about their politics.

    As Downie and Schudson sum up their goals, the report states, “Rather than depending primarily on newspapers and their waning reporting resources, each sizeable American community should have a range of diverse sources of news reporting. They should include a variety and mix of commercial and nonprofit news organizations that can both compete and collaborate with one another. They should be adapting traditional journalistic forms to the multimedia, interactive, real-time capabilities of digital communication, sharing the reporting and distribution of news with citizens, bloggers, and aggregators.“

      I hope and feel their optimism is justified. There is still a significant demand for news that voters, the owners of their government, can use.