You could argue that in the new news ecosystem, leveraging cheap and often-free technology, social media, eyewitness news, wikinews volunteers, et al won’t require as many professional journalists as we had in newspapers’ heyday. But I think we need more professionals than we’ve got now. We’re still at the point where there are plenty of “news deserts” in the U.S., which means that there’s plenty of room for unchecked corruption. I’m not sure that an army of local journo-entrepreneurs, succeeding in small-c fashion, will be enough to right the ship without some big-C success happening as well.

My heartburn with the seed for this month’s #jcarn was the focus on big C capitalism and the insistence that making lots of money should be the primary goal. I don’t think this is the route to either monetary success or happiness.

Michael’s point is VERY important.

The reason we have information monopolies in the first place is the nature of the good: high fixed costs to produce, low marginal costs to distribute. Today the gap between the two is as wide as possible as the distribution cost is almost zero and the production cost is extremely low relative to newspapers and TV stations. I went on a bit about this on G+ and my blog last night/this morning (depending on your point of view; to me it’s last night when I have not yet gone to bed!).

That does not mitigate the need to be cognizant of the appearance of favoritism (I’m assuming above board ethics) — which was the original reason (I think) for the separation of church and state. It wasn’t so much that journos didn’t need to understand the business, they needed/need for their work not to be influenced by who pays the bills — if we want to continue a model of public service (speak truth to power) journalism.

Whether journalists work in a newsroom or own a startup, their role is fully integrated with the larger enterprise. I doubt all journalists will be entrepreneurs, just like any other profession. But all journalists will need to understand how their decisions and actions affect the enterprise, for better or worse.

Not everyone is on board now — and frankly I blame J-schools for perpetuating the fantasy until just the past few years — but someday the idea of the insulated journalist will seem like an IBM Selectric — useful once, but not anymore.

Steve, why does there need to be a “‘big’ solution to local/hyperlocal news” at all? Isn’t that the problem? Big corporations got too big, too cumbersome, bought up properties all over creation, stopped caring about them and cut the quality back even before the changes wrought by this digital revolution we’re a part of now.

Small is beautiful. It’s working for a lot of us, but just like any business, it takes a lot of time to build it up. I’m very concerned that there is this idea out there that if a news site doesn’t suddenly start generating tons of cash within a few years it’s not sustainable. That’s just not reality in any business, and that expectation shouldn’t be pinned on news, either.

Back in the day, big media companies and the elitists populating the newsrooms at large dailies never gave us the time of day. In fact, there was often outright disdain for the peasantry out there covering the trivial stuff we cover. Now that they recognize community journalism as, possibly, the last bastion of survival, our “turf” has been “discovered” and big media companies are trying to figure out how to impose an unworkable business model on this thing they’ve renamed “hyperlocal,” in the hope of sustaining themselves.

I moved from print to digital community journalism. But it’s still community journalism. And instead of working for someone else’s family-owned business, I’m a small-business owner working for my own family. I’m not looking to build an empire, or have a staff of hundreds. I’m not looking to “scale.” I just want to keep doing what I love to do, in the community where I live, a place that I love — and to earn a decent living at it, to boot, as we are doing, well… how’d I get so lucky, anyway?

While big corporations try to figure out how to crack this nut, and former big media employees lament about the big, empty voids they perceive as a result of their loss of salaried employment and/or debate the viability/sustainability of this “new” thing they’ve coined “hyperlocal” — and even as some refugees from their world try to figure out how to *do* this themselves, I and people of my ilk will continue to do what we do. And I believe we’ll be doing it long after the big boys and their capital Cs have trained their sights on other, no doubt easier, ways to carry their bloated payrolls and turn a profit for their shareholders.