USA TODAY Column: …How about if companies that have flourished in the new economy — think Apple, Google, Verizon — stepped up to the plate and subsidized some of these valuable but financially struggling upstarts, the journalist and Web entrepreneur asks.
“If the winners of the new economy put a tiny bit of their wealth into this (area), this whole space would be transformed,” says [Steve] Waldman, the principal author of the FCC’s major 2011 study of the state of the American news media.
Waldman issued the challenge at a recent conference at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., on the future of non-profit journalism. In recent years, as traditional news organizations have cut back deeply in the face of the digital tsunami, non-profits large and small, generally online operations, have arisen to help fill the gap. While their total workforce is a mere fraction of the journalism jobs that have vanished, many of the new players are doing important work, ranging from powerful investigative reporting to granular, street-level local coverage. They are an exciting addition to the media mix… (more)
EDITOR: What makes Waldman think that the newly rich have priorities different from than older money? They don’t want their friends, clients and selves to be criticized. As we witness here in Lancaster, ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’
