The future of newspapers?

All the News That's Fit to Buy

Inside David Geffen's play for The New York Times.

With the NYT struggling on multiple fronts (a changing media landscape, the financial crisis, etc), the rumor surrounding David Geffen making it into a non-profit is quite interesting. Sadly the climate for newspapers is well beyond painful at this point, and the reality is many of them won't survive to see the end of the year. The reality is, however, that much of the media replacing newspapers (blogs, online news sites, etc) don't have the "feet on the street" to cover a lot of the news happening in the world. This is what the people in a well functioning democracy require in order to be truly informed. Without these journalists out there covering stories and digging for leads, we are left to the mercy of official sources from the government or from corporate public affairs offices. This is dangerous and makes propaganda campaigns and misleading the public all too easy. Hopefully a non-profit model is a viable fit for important media outlets like the NY Times (as it was for the St. Petersburg Times), otherwise I feel that we are in big trouble.