Bernice Yeung

David Carr writes about the release of a 100-page report on the future of newsrooms and journalism in today’s NYT. Commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School, the report recommends:

… tinkering with the tax structure to accommodate nonprofit status for news-gathering organizations, persuading philanthropic foundations to fill the funding gap in more permanent ways, involving universities in news gathering, and opening up databases to make them more useful for both pro and pro-am efforts.

The report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” also proposes that the government should throw down some cash-money to support public interest journalism:

“We are just suggesting that certain kinds of reporting are a public good and should be funded as such,” Mr. Downie said. “There are plenty of precedents and I don’t think that government support necessarily means government control.”

He knows that the very idea of government-financed media will put some people in a tizzy, but said, “We are at something of a pivot point, a very real crisis that is happening right now.”

Well, I, for one, don’t see why there’d be a tizzy over government-funded journalism in the public interest (we already have workable examples from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio). What I’m in a tizzy about is this continued insistence on a purely market-driven model of journalism.

– via The Media Equation – What Would It Take to Support a Newsroom? – NYTimes.com.