Who will pay

There is quite a lot of discussion on my favourite topic of who will pay for the new journalism?

John Honderich has written a good piece for the Toronto Star in which he asks the question If traditional news outlets could no longer afford to do the investigative stories that inform public debate and influence a community's quality of life, who could?

The question he says

relates directly to the very quality of our democracy. In order for all of us to live meaningfully and participate in our community, we must be appropriately informed.

a point that I have made on this blog numerous times.

John rejects the Sarkozy model of government intervention in the media in favour of models such as the America ProPublica or the model of serious journalists approaching trusts and foundations for backing for investigative journalism such as the fund for investigative journalism

Meanwhile at Harvard business publishing Dan Gillmor asks What's the Best Business Model for Newspapers?

He discusses the a piece, by Yale's chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, who he says

starts with a questionable idea -- that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them --

But relates to Zachary Seward who wrote at Nieman who wrote that

we'd be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

Dan makes a good economic point that

Nonprofits generally exist, meanwhile, to ameliorate failures in the for-profit marketplace. Markets do fail, and they do so frequently.

Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic Adrian Monck comes up with a model which he calls the Nobel strategy

Publish provocative, but premature obituaries of the super rich - and then explain how they can redeem themselves by leaving their badly-gotten billions to - yes - a newspaper.

There is no easy answer.In fact as part of a project at UCLAN,I am working in a group which will be producing a 20 minute documentary entitled who will pay on this very subject.

I don't expect we will come up with the answer but hopefully some good ideas will come out of it