http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/05/07/murdoch.web.content/index.html

“I sawed a cat in a garbage can and then i walked into adare park and went down the slide. police showed up and said i couldnot slide at 4am but i ran away and fell asleep under the mary gay house.”

Kim, thanks for the insights. I’ll follow up later when I have a bit more time!

On the contrary, I think those that always were informed are more informed than ever and that a lot of new people have gained superficial knowledge thanks to the new media. Call me idealistic but this is what I see – more people know more, more quickly, about more items than ever before. The group that always enjoyed in-depth Network features, The Economist, Frontline or 60 Minutes reporting is not worse off IMHO.

As for local journalism, I do not believe large media companies could hire enough people to cover what folks want to know. Even just in Decatur there is more going on than 1 person or 1 outlet can possibly track and report. What you do, Nick, is leverage what you know to the benefit of your neighbors. In essence, you are like an information concierge for Decatur and provide an invaluable service via your information brokering.

As for $$$, I’m a working guy and can’t spare the cash at the moment but here’s a boomerang plug for you. Encourage your readers to go vote for your material that is cross-posted at my site and you’ll likely win quarterly or annual awards at our community site. The awards are be based on reader contributions so there is no $$$ limit. This is a trial for 2009 and I hope the model works for folks because it makes sense to me and rewards those that do the work of information “concierge.” I’m trying to harness the power of community by letting folks “drive” the awards.

I believe these types of syndication networks are the right way to gather and redistribute the tsunami of information available. We ALL have to help each other out to manage it efficiently – some by submitting content, others by rating it, and hopefully others by pitching in a buck or two.

Bottoms up.

I wonder if people would actually do that after getting news online for “free” for so long. I guess public radio is a good example of an institution that still subsists on donations thanks to a loyal audience.

I also wonder how “local” you would have to be to make this model work. Could Decatur support a full-time blogger/journalist using this method? Or would the journalist have to cover all of metro-Atlanta? The limitation becomes how much can a single person cover? I’ve always believed that Decatur is a manageable for one person…but nothing bigger. Expand to cover all of Atlanta and tons of stuff begins to fall through the cracks. Cover a very specific topic, like say Atlanta politics, and you become too focused.