What has to change, however, is our attitude toward the different sources that feed us information. In the old age of broadcast and print journalism, it was easy to remain passive and take for granted what we heard or read, because these institutions built their credibility on a history of highly-regulated and structured reporting. But now that we are overwhelmed by the amount of information we’re receiving, we’re going to have to be much smarter at sorting this information out and take from it what we need.

“In 2009 literacy isn’t about finishing a book or slogging through 12 web pages to get to the end of an article. It is about knowing what to do with information, how to find the good stuff, how to assess sources. What matters is not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers,” writes Utne Reader’s librarian Danielle Maestretti in the magazine’s July-August 2009 issue.

Whereas the journalism industry will probably regulate itself naturally, media literacy cannot be achieved without effort and education.

Our big focus is on doing more with less — which is why we’ve shifted from six issues a year to being a quarterly, as well as using a more strategic distribution system (fewer newsstands mean less waste) and seriously increasing the amount of content online.

Now, I appreciate Good magazine’s effort to reduce their impact on the environment, but I can’t help but thinking that the reason behind these changes is in fact economical. C’mon, “fewer newsstands mean less waste?” And how much money are you going to save by doing this?

Bruce Ackerman‘s choice is for national endowments, that would be mainly targeted at investigative journalism, since  “Each national endowment would subsidise investigations on a strict mathematical formula based on the number of citizens who actually read their reports on news sites,” Ackerman writes.

Dan Kennedy advocates a change of the law that governs non-profit institutions. According to that law, non-profit institutions can only benefit from a tax-exempt status if they don’t “influence legislation” or “participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates”. Kennedy writes that the law was enacted by a biased Lyndon Johnson and is not compatible with the first amendment. If that part of the law is suppressed, newspapers will be able to apply for non-profit status.

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…

In order to limit the influence of financial contributors who might be driven by personal interests, donations are limited to 20% of the cost of the story.

Spot Us was founded by Dave Cohn, a 26-year-old journalist, with the help of a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. It might very well be the future of reporting!

spot.us

The NYT: “A different way to pay for the news you want,” August 23, 2008

The BPP was actually picked by very few NPR member stations. Most users listen to the show online or through podcasting, but that was enough to draw an audience of about one million unique listeners in April and May, according to the New York Times. In spite of this success, NPR decided to cancel the show because of its cost (it had a first-year budget of $2 millions.)

The show’s cancellation drew reactions from hundreds of angry listeners on its website as well as elsewhere in the web community. Many feel that it could be continued as an entirely web-based program, and that opinion is shared by the BPP’s staff. In my opinion, this is how it should have been created in the first place. Most NPR member stations and listeners were obviously not ready to give up on the Morning Edition, NPR’s traditional morning program. Traditional news media seem so scared to explore the possibilities that the web has to offer, they seem unable to give up on their usual format and to realize that there is an audience out there that is receptive to new ideas and concepts. It is a scary and difficult task to accomplish, I know, but as long as they don’t understand that the way they’ve been working for decades is not suitable for new technologies, the only online news sources that will be successful will be blogs and social networking services (and I want something better than that.)

An article published in the summer issue of the Columbia Journalism Review intends on leading journalists in the right direction and in the same time can be used by the public to learn how to be critical of what they read, see and hear.

The website includes a “Breaking on the web” section, which gathers some news bulletins published by other news organizations, and divides its own articles between traditional categories, such as business, politics, or health and science.

ProPublica is far from being the only media of its kind. A number of online newspapers have popped up on the web, with different orientations and different ways to gather funding to sustain themselves.

In France, at least four have been created in the last couple of years, in direct reaction to the evolution of traditionnal media. All of their editors and most of their collaborators previously worked in the most important French publications, such as Le Monde or Libération.

Bakchich is an openly leftist website and hosts articles, blogs and videos. It addresses various issues but concentrates on national politics. It is funded by private investors and subscription to its weekly edition.

Rue89 is definitely more objective. Like a traditional media, it deals with the usual sections and includes a good dose of culture reporting, but in the same time it really delves into the possibilities offered by its online format. Small sound pieces and videos are interspersed in the articles, sometimes replacing in a very efficient and interactive way the use of transcribed quotes. It also hosts a number of blogs and gives a large part to the readers’ participation (they can get their own articles published.) The site is funded by advertising and an online boutique.

Mediapart is slightly more elitist and doesn’t give as many opportunities to the public to express themselves. It operates on a different basis, since its relies on subscriptions. So far, over 5000 people have subscribed. The website is updated three times a day. It also has a “club,” which hosts blogs edited by readers and journalists.

Arrêt sur Images is one of the most interesting online experiments. Formerly a TV program broadcasted on one of the public channels, it was suppressed in 2007 in spite of satisfying audience results. Its host, Daniel Schneidermann, decided to continue the show online. Like the TV show, the website analyses the content of the media in order to determine if news coverage was fair and objective.