Toward an online, local and non-profit journalism

Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity. It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.

This quote from Buzz Woolley, president of VoiceofSanDiego, can be found at the very end of a recent New York Times article about next-gen online newspapers. Yet it perfectly summarizes the recent transformation of the newspaper industry, toward a local and publicly-funded reporting. VoiceofSanDiego is an online, non-profit and local newspaper. It is funded by individuals, foundations and businesses and has a readership of about 18,000. Like Spot Us, it’s experimenting a new kind of business model, which has since been taken up by many others.

I’ve always thought that journalism should be a non-profit activity. It is indeed a public service, even if it must stay independent from the government. Making profits off the news just doesn’t seem quite right…