This plan to create a large, self-funded, independent outfit conducting deep, investigative journalism that will be sold to high-profile outlets seems like a good one. Indeed, amidst all this talk of newspaper dying and closing bureaus and generally going straight to hell, I think folks forget that there's something of an opportunity here.
The newspaper business model never made a whole lot of sense. Putting aside reliance on wire services for a second, single, regional news outlets trying to self-fund coverage of the whole world through advertising and classified sections was always a bit un-economical. But there's really no reason that the distribution and content production arms can't splinter apart. Independent bureaus could sprout up in all areas, for all kinds of topics, and survive off selling their journalism to the distributors. Having these semi-self-funded bureaus might actually produce better content, through various efficiencies of scale, aggregations of expertise, reporter collaboration, and so forth. And they'd also offer the possibility of new business models, from direct subscriptions to the bureau's content to straight foundation funding to small donor journalism. Given the press's huge importance, a certain amount of status quo bias makes sense. But given the fairly sorry state of the press, it's a bit weird to spend so much time worrying about the preservation of a dying business model and so little hying the development of alternatives.
