Community Funded Reporting

An interesting twist on the nonprofit media idea: let citizens directly fund reporting on issues they want to see covered.

National Journalism Fund

This Boston Globe columnist calls for a national journalism fund, an intriguing idea. But why does the author include only on-line efforts? Paper and ink are still extremely relevant in low-income communities where Internet access is sparse at best.

'The Trouble with Nonprofit Journalism'

I'll have more to say about this soon., but here's an article critical of nonprofit journalism.

Newspapers on Computers a la 1981

Take a look.

Berkeley Daily Planet

The Berkeley Daily Planet mulls the idea of Community Supported Journalism on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.

After the Jump: What Those Former Journalists Are Up to Now

AJR takes a look at what all those former journalists have been doing and how they feel about it.

Internet as a Right?

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post here about the concept of Internet as a right.

My initial thought on this is that it would be more precise to talk about information as a right. Saying the Internet is a right is sort of like saying that hospitals or medical offices are a right, rather than the health care provided within them.

And what kind of information should we have the right to? I would suggest we start with the information most useful to people on a daily basis -- what schools are available to send your children to; details of community meetings; where crime is prevalent and what police are doing to protect the community; the list goes on ....

Of course, providing this hyper-local level of information requires a different economic model. I think it has to be a nonprofit model fueled by hybrid sources of revenue -- mainly advertising supplemented by philanthropy.

We're doing that here in the Bronx.