PayPal for a Free & Open Media

The future of newspapers -- is not really something I lose sleep over. The better concern should be: The future of a free and open media. The media that is supposed to be the checks and balances to the government (instead of shills). With media jettisoning news creators -- read that: bonafide journalists, the question is: who will do the work? Better still: who will pay them to do the work?

The New York Times had a front cover story of a Pennsylvania VA Hospital that didn't have safeguards in place so that a rogue doctor was able to botch about 90 routine prostate procedures -- errantly putting radioactive seeds in bladders and rectums to consign his patients to a life of misery. The article ran easily 5000 words -- and probably took hundreds of hours to pull together. That's one mere example of good reporting -- and doesn't take into account the hundreds of thousands put in by good journalists all over the country safeguarding our democracy. Who will pay for this? Syndicated columnis Aaron Harber presents some very timely and well-thought out suggestions on the future of news gathering.

Let's face it, the commercialization of the media has not been a panacea. Not much is open nor free when media owners squash or skew stories because it may offend an advertiser. (You are naive if you think this doesn't happen.) Still, most of think of news coverage as a de facto right -- and expect to have people committing hours of their life tracking down the truth for us. But are we willing to pay for high quality reporting?

What is the value in the news gathering efforts -- listening for leads, reaching out to victims, researching backgrounds, interviewing countless sources -- many of whom can't keep facts straight, delving into databases -- to then sit down and right a 5000-word piece? (And that is 5000 words that follow rules of grammar -- no smilies and no abbrev.) How do we subsidize what might have been months of work for our behalf?

In watching this Iranians struggle to find the truth we can see first hand the value of news. But of course there is an intense distrust of our own media -- which may have been made worse by Vanity Fair's Matt Pressman's navel-gazing attempt to get at the "truth." The deal is there is a very good chance that our gravy train will end; that there might cease to be major corporations willing to pay staffs of people on average upwards of $50,000 a year to report on abuses and scandals. And when that happens, we may find ourselves helping to support passionate activists like Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, an Iranian emigree, who is fully dedicated to getting out news about her native country -- and who lives on the PayPal donations of others -- in the home of her parents.