http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/24/rebootingTheNews10.html
I can really recommend this podcast by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer. It's class.
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/20/aBigIdeaInALittlePodcast.html
"If you were meant to make money doing this, as in meant by the Invisible Hand, you will. If not, something else will happen. Even the smartest financial type has no clue how the news will work economically in the future. And reporters are not smart about finance. So just do it and pray it all works out. That's basically all any of us have. So you're just like everyone else. Go figure! :-)"

Rupert Murdoch has come out against Google. Yes. That Rupert Murdoch.
This is a man who used technology to destroy jobs in order to increase profits. He dragged the British print media into the gutter in order to pay off the loans he used to build his company. He sneered at any thought of public service in journalism.
Now he's getting support from more liberal quarters. It's a strange argument though.
First Google's criticised for aggregating information on Google News. Copyright theft! Then it's criticised for taking down content from YouTube after the copyright holders demanded money for it. Denying exposure to copyright holders!
That's not to say Google is a benificent force for good. It's a listed company. Like all listed companies the primary aim of its founding documents is to make profits for shareholders. That's what it's for. And that means its business decisions will tend towards monopoly.
But in terms of the debate about defending the traditional content producers - the newspapers who are touting themselves as the guardians of democracy - John Naughton has a good point.
"I’m [...] all in favour of newspapers that perform that noble function. The only problem is that 95% of them haven’t performed it for decades, if ever. Mostly they operated by printing as much crap as could fit between the advertisements. When Craigslist took away the ads they were left with only the crap — for which, oddly enough, customers are reluctant to pay."
Which brings us right back to Mr Murdoch.

The quote is from Jay Rosen - who's published a useful round up of the current blogging about the future of news.
There are some interesting ideas here. I like this one. It's an idea I've been kicking about myself for about six months or so, so I want to see what comes of it.
One thing that struck me is the sense of loss out there about the demise of papers. What is it about that model of journalism that appeals to hacks so much? Is it something to do with working together for a common goal and being able to actually touch, see and smell the thing you've collectively created?
What would happen in a world of autonomous investigative journalists selling their skills to the community? I think that - at their best - newsrooms can be some of the most creative places in the world. Would journalism lose out, it if lost that collective workplace?
One last thought from Rosen about the job cuts: "It’s a terrible loss for the public when people who bought the public service dream lose their jobs providing that service, and realizing that dream."
That's an important point for me. Most journalists didn't go in for the job to tell lies and make money at any cost. And a few of us went into it with a stated notion of serving a public good. But - surprise, surprise - it turns out that private ownership and the public good are inimical. The journalists losing their jobs are the first to suffer; the rest of us will suffer a bit later on.

More and more folk are joining the debate about the future of local journalism in the UK. Interesting piece about it on Wordblog by Andrew Grant-Adamson. Also encouraging to see that there's going to be a nation-wide conference about the subject following the NUJ's lobby of Westminster.
Jeremy Dear says: "...any look at local media shouldn't just look at how to protect existing companies but how to help journalists, local communities and businesses develop alternatives that may be specialist, small-scale, may be trusts, co-operatively run or simply locally-owned companies."
I really agree with that. I think there are thousands of down-hearted journalists out there who would grab a chance to create new organisations and new ways of delivering quality local news. It's really important to me that these new companies are not-for-profit and have some kind of community control. Community Co-ops would be my own preference, but maybe Community Interest Companies could do the job in a more traditional way.
Why? Because in a capitalist world 'locally-owned companies' become 'globally-owned companies' scarily quickly. If any of these thousand flowers keep on blooming, they'll soon be plucked by Gannett or some other bugger.

Last month I posted a comment on the NUJ Left blog after a public meeting they held about media ownership.
I think ownership of the media is the key to the future of journalism. Newspapers aren't just commodities - they're a badge of identity. People make a conscious effort to purchase a particular paper over others - they want to associate themselves with it.
So the readership of a paper is a ready-made community. Could we tap into that? Could newspapers be owned by the communities that identify themselves with them?
Here's a thought that I stuck up on Facebook a wee while ago about The Herald. This was in light of the row over job cuts there.
"The Herald's ABC is about 100,000. Purchase price for the group will be about £180m. That's £1800 a head.
"A loan for that amount would cost about £9 a week for five years for each of those 100,000.
"The Herald Group makes about £20m a year.
"Say as a reward for our generosity we all give ourselves a free Sunday Herald each week. That'll cost about £8m. The other £12m could be reinvested in the papers.
"OK, paying £9 a week for a paper is excessive, But we could make it for life. After five years, you'd stop paying the loan, but you'd keep getting your papers free. Say you live for 30 years, ignoring inflation, a Sunday Herald each week would cost you £2340. You've saved money!"
Looks like Polly Toynbee thinks some kind of not-for-profit local trusts could be a way forward too. Of course, my ideal would be to have the community not only owning the paper but electing the board and making decisions about investment and broad editorial policy. Being owned by an unelected trust isn't enough to safeguard local papers.

Every blog needs a reason to be. Mine is to help me find my feet.
Between 2005 and 2007 I ran Southside Media, a not-for-profit social enterprise publishing community newspapers and online social networks in the southside of Glasgow. I returned to BBC Scotland in October 2007, two years after I'd left, in the hope that I'd left behind a self-sustaining enterprise - a model of local journalism and community networking that could shine long into the future; a model I hoped others might be able to replicate across the country.