Sure enough, it was a piece by Henry Blodget at Silicon Valley Insider entitled Our Plan To Fix The New York Times . It was posted in January, 2009, more than two years ago.

It contained three steps.

1. Cut costs 40% by 2010.
2. Continue to raise print subscription prices
3. Explore charging an online subscription fee

Read the whole article. It sounds very close to what has been happening at the New York Times. Interesting how smart this blogging world is.

“Things are going to get weirder before they get saner.”

And he adds:

“In real revolutions things get worse before they get better. .. One of the bad things I think is going to happen is, I think civic corruption is just going to rise for towns and regions of under about half a million people. Which is to say, I think the old model of the newspaper is going to break faster than the hyperlocal civic reporting can come in its place.”

You can see my complete video interview with Shirky and read the full transcript at the Center for Sustainable Journalism.

It will be the first of more than a dozen interviews I have videoed on the future of journalism.

End of the world as we know it

And the text:

Just saw that Gourmet is ceasing publication, a victim of the times. Sigh.

Thirty years of her loyalty ends with this brush off as written in the New York Times:

In an interview at Condé Nast headquarters Monday morning, the chief executive Charles H. Townsend explained why he had made the cuts he had. The simple answer: the magazines were losing money.

“We will not be in that position after today — we won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution.”

That’s it. Nothing about quality. Nothing about loyalty. Just about money. Close to 1 million subscribers and if you if trust Condé Nast’s ABC figures (I don’t), close to 6 million readers are told in essence: Look it is not about you and never has been, it is about the money.

If we as consumers leave it to corporate America to decide what media we receive, it will eventually, always go for the money over all else. It is time that we as consumers take it into our own hands to pay for and thus decide what media we find worthy. That’s what we are working on over at the Center for Sustainable Journalism and my guess is that today we have found about 1 million allies who are thinking the same thing.

I anticipated that maybe a couple of dozen people might show up. So I was a bit nonplussed when I came on stage — really an altar — and saw at least 200 people seated in the church’s pews to hear our panel.

My message was that if the public doesn’t step up and start to support journalism, it was going to disappear and our democracy was in trouble. I repeated a line I have given before: If you the public don’t find enough value in what we do, then why should we do it?

I pay for my haircut and every other service, so why not pay for journalism? The days of advertisers paying for your journalism is waning, if not over.

So who in the audience, I asked, will step forward and help save journalism? The answer was the 25 citizens who filled out forms saying they were ready to help. We at the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University will meet with these 25 citizens and anyone else interested in advancing the cause of sound journalism. Maybe this is the beginning of a national citizens’ movement to advance high quality, ethically sound journalism. We will see.

I must tell you, I have seen indications of this coming. In casual conversations I have had with people, a fair number of them realize that journalism is in deep trouble and they are afraid, as am I, of a world without journalism.

Remember the proverd: Mighty oaks from little acorn grow. If you want to be part of our pioneering effort, get in touch. Be part of our charter meeting which I will be call in early October.

By the way, I shared the panel with Leon Levitt, Vice President of Digital Media at Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Hank Klibanoff, coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, who until recently was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s managing editor.

Business Development Officer

The Business Development Officer will assist in commercializing sustainable journalism or media enterprises and will advance for-profit and nonprofit efforts aimed at promoting high quality, ethically sound journalism. The BDO will help move journalism research, concepts, funded projects and experimentation into self-sustaining entities. The BDO will do so by developing strategic business plans, helping raise capital, monitoring the progress of entities it helps start and providing guidance in maximizing the potential for follow-up funding from appropriate commercial, private or governmental sources. The BDO may provide consulting services to other entities when appropriate and when that consulting corresponds to the Center for Sustainable Journalism’s mission of providing high quality, ethically sound journalism. In this joint appointment between the Center and the Department of Communication, the BDO also will hold the academic title of Distinguished Lecturer in Professional Practice in this 12- month, non-tenured faculty appointment and have a one-one-one teaching load.

Go here for more information qualifications and how to apply.

The other is for a:

Research Director

The Research Director will have a demonstrated and continuing applied research agenda that provides scholars, students, citizens, entrepreneurs, and professionals a well grounded understanding of what is needed to advance financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism. The Research Director will report to Leonard Witt, Executive Director of the Center, and work closely with the Center’s Director, its Business Development Officer and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ development officer and its grant writing specialist.  The Center aims to be an internationally recognized hub for research and development of business models that will provide sustainable journalism in the future. An entrepreneurial spirit is welcome.

This is a 9-month, research oriented full-time tenure track faculty position with a 1/1 course teaching load in the Department of Communication.

Click here for information on qualifications and how to apply.

The Center is funded in part by a pledge from The Harnisch Foundation of $1.5 million spread over a five-year period to advance research aimed at discovering innovative ways to produce financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism. Read more about the center here.

Let me explain, I lived in Minnesota for 18 years and was addicted to its public radio news and information station; that was true even before I went to work for Minnesota Public Radio.

Then I moved to Marietta, Georgia, where the local public radio station WABE provided too much classical music and too little news and information to satisfy my listening habits.

When I got in the car, I longed for my smart public radio news and information. Of course, I had an infinite number of other free radio stations to listen to, but I didn’t want junk, I wanted public radio news and information. So I bought a Sirius radio and paid $13 a month, $156 a year, to listen to the high quality public radio programming I wanted. That’s all I used the Sirius radio for, I rarely listen to much else.

Now that I have a iPhone, I am dumping my Sirius radio. Why? Because I can get even more high quality public radio news and information on my iPhone  via live radio or via podcasts that I save to the iPhone. Now I simply plug the iPhone into my car radio.

Soon all radio is going to be generated through something like an iPhone. So if I ran public radio, I would say, if you want high quality radio via your mobile device it will cost you or you don’t get it. Will I pay for it? Yes, certainly, I miss it too much not to pay. I value it.

Will I pay for it if they give it to me for free and then ask me for money, maybe.

Remember I was not paying for Sirius, I was paying 100 percent for public radio news and information.

So will people pay for high quality journalism and information? I do think so because I know one person intimately who already has. And trust me that person is very tight with his money.

Keep in mind, I am saying high quality news and information. Run of the mill junk is a worthless commodity. High quality journalism is scarce and will be more so in the future, and that’s when everyone who loves great journalism will begin to pay.

I am also talking about a brand that I know will deliver high quality information every day, so I am willing to pay in advance for that brand and its contents. Public radio and The New York Times are those brands.

Jeff Jarvis, thinks I am wrong, but we will find out who is right and who is wrong soon enough because if you want high quality news and information, you will have to pay for it. The big boys have finally seen the light.

Rather than listening to the information-is free crowd, we should all be trying to figure out this dilemma as written about in The New York Times today:

Consumers are using their mobile phones to download tens of millions of games, songs, ring tones and video programs. And they shell out money for these items, even as they resist paying for similar digital goodies online using their computers.

It is a curious equation: pay for stuff on a tiny, low-resolution screen while getting some of the very same games and video free on a fancy widescreen monitor.

Here is part of the problem:

Content developers say consumers like the instant gratification of downloading on the go. By contrast, PC users have to go through a few more steps to pay for items online because, most of the time, they must enter credit card information for each purchase.

Research shows that the more steps a person must take to pay, the less likely he is to buy something. Besides, people have simply become used to paying for things on the phone.

Programs exist for one click payments at news sites. Bill Densmore has been pushing his ClickShare and Information Valet Project for years.

I don’t want to gouge audiences by forcing them to overpay for information, but I do want enough money available to pay journalists to provide high quality news and information. Paying for news would be a tiny fraction of all the money that is now being paid for content from games to ring tones. We can solve this problem. Rather than information is free, our mantra should be that high quality information is valuable and worthy of a few micro payments here and there.

Mike Schinkel took the photo below plus many more and Urvaksh Karkaria wrote a blog post at the Atlanta Business Chronicle summarizing what took place. As you will see in the Karkaria post, several of the journalists who left the mainstream are busy with alternative forms of delivering journalism even as they lament the past. Their efforts vary from investigative journalism to providing syndicated news for rural papers. Things are happening.

See below who attended for the beginning, we hope, of more informal but rich discussions.

Standing (l-to-r): Selah Abrams, John Sugg, Urvaksh Karkaria, Siddiq Bello, Benita Dodd, Jim Walls (guy with beard and hat), Tom Baxter, Jon Sinton (really tall guy), Maria Saporta, Lyle V. Harris, Leonard Witt.

Seated (l-to-r): Beth Kurylo, Amani Channel and Devin Alexander Channel and Diana Witt.

We have to get better as journalists. From my perspective, this actually helps long-form in-depth journalism since the crowd is less likely to go that direction. In fact, they’re taking some of the burden off of us in producing and discovering the things that waste our time. For me, the larger question is why we are wasting our time and skills covering stories that the crowd is all over. Why are we, as professional journalists, allocating our resources for such daily, perishable stories? We should be allocating them for things that are in-depth, investigative and require the kind of expertise and professionalism that we have.

Here is more:

People are asked to do less with more and not given the time. Time is the greatest luxury in journalism. It’s why we don’t publish on a deadline. We publish when we feel a project is ready. All of these things connect to each other and in really interesting ways to passion. What an exciting time to be practicing journalism!