If you have a better proposal on how to save journalism, I'd love to hear it.
I like the idea of helping news organizations convert into nonprofits much better than Eric Schmidt's suggestion that they abandon the journalism "product" and find a new one.
Nationalize a few newspapers. A couple billion dollars a year would finance an incredible number of investigative journalists, and it would be far better for democracy than what we currently have -- dumbed down news designed to maximize viewership and ad sales.
State-funded doesn't mean state-run. On it's face, I agree that government being remotely associated with media is a bad thing. The fact of the matter is, though, that the quality of reporting that comes out of publicly-funded news organizations generally exceeds that of their private counterparts.
BBC news is one example (corporate alternatives? Telegraph/Daily mail). In the US, the only good national source of news on television is the News Hour on PBS. Frontline, as dramatic as it is, is much more palatable and thorough than its corporate investigative-journalist counterparts. Similarly, Public radio stands alone as a good source of news and commentary.
Many European countries have followed the model of the BBC, with very good results. Holland (where I'm living) has an interesting model where public broadcasting organizations make tv/radio programs, and those organizations are allocated money and airtime by the government based on their membership/viewer numbers.
Just because there are conflict-of-interest problems with public (government) money funding the press doesn't mean that there aren't equally serious conflict-of-interest problems between private (commercial) money doing the same.
I like the idea of helping news organizations convert into nonprofits much better than Eric Schmidt's suggestion that they abandon the journalism "product" and find a new one.