Taking his own local paper as the basis for his argument, Clay Shirky looks at why local news reporters need ‘a rescue operation’.
“There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model,” he writes.
Newsrooms need to look at the people necessary to producing the ‘iron core of news’ (as defined by Alex Jones) and those who can’t be replace as easily as other areas of content, such as columns, suggests Shirky.
He goes on to argue that working for a non-profit news organisation will be an increasingly attractive option for these reporters as a result.