I try to make it a habit to find at least one worthwhile Twitter feed and/or blog. A while back, I stumbled upon this neat little thought:

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I stumbled across this tweet and got to thinking about non-profits.

Read the linked blog here

I won’t be exploring that particular question right now, as it is what I found at the poster’s homepage that really sparked my interest. Savethenews.org is a group dedicated to, “exploring the intersection between the future of journalism, public policy, and citizen action.”

Journalism is in crisis. Hell yes it is. If it isn’t the dwindling job market, it’s the overall drop in quality and the merging of ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’.

Democracy depends on quality reporting. Absolutely. We are the forth estate! Without us, there IS no democracy!

And then I wiggled my nose in disgust as a smug grin grew on my face. We need policy solutions. It was even accompanied by a nice image of the capital building. The government? No thank you. Back in April, John Kerry was holding hearings on journalism and one of the suggestions floating around at the time was a bailout for media. Excuse me, bailouts are for corporate bigwigs that wore gold-plated underwear and used diamond cream, not us hard-working blue collar journalist stiffs.

I didn’t take the Senator’s discussion seriously, as I have always held the belief that the best possible thing for journalism is a complete and total collapse of the industry. It is only through complete destruction of corporate overlords can a true industry, built around truth and decency, be born. In short, screw shareholders.

Enough of my self-important rambling. In the interest of giving them a fair shot, I clicked around a bit more on Save The News, and I saw something that caught my eye.

“We need to explore how the federal government can best support the future of investigative journalism, beat reporting and quality news in America. This is not about newspapers, it is about newsrooms. It is not about protecting old institutions, it is about serving local communities.”

Federal government? Bad. Newsrooms? Good. Serving communities? Good. What an interesting pair of sentences. I could already feel an odd tingling as my firmly-held beliefs about what should happen to journalism began to, if not shift, at least question themselves.

I kept on reading. I’ll spare you the details (or encourage you to find them out for yourself) but here are some things that caught my eye:

• Encouraging the establishment of nonprofit and low-profit news organizations
• R&D Fund for Journalism innovation
• Provide adversarial perspectives
• The government has always subsidized media and continues to shape media through public policy, though not always in ways that benefit the public interest.

There. They straight up address the concerns so many have about government getting involved. Naturally, they have a tough job of justifying government investment in newsrooms. And, can ya believe it? They do a decent job. They point out the existence of NPR and PBS, whose communities continue to grow. The explore the possibilities government investing in fellowships and education programs for future journalists.

One of their bits that excited me most was the concept of a government-funded Journalism Experimentation program. One of the most exciting bits about modern journalism (and part of what keeps me so engaged, day in and day out) is the fact that we don’t know what it is going to look like in 5 or 10 years. Twitter has revolutionized the way we receive and process news. Even if you don’t like the service, you can’t deny it has had a major impact on the relationship between news makers and news digesters. A steady flow of money working towards developing new, meaningful forms of journalism has me downright tingly on the inside.

There are a lot of intriguing concepts discussed on that website. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but it is great to see real dialogue about real ideas happening.