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.

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.

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.

Compare this video with this upbeat, let’s bring out the talking points of the future of online journalism commentary by Michelle Nicolosi, executive producer of the new SeattlePI.com.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

He adds:

Any experiment … designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

The article and the graphic are a grim reminder of what is happening. It’s a reminder why so many folks, including all of us at the Center for Sustainable Journalism, are trying to find new models.

Here is the graphic’s introduction:

Heavy debt has dragged several newspaper companies into bankruptcy. The industry’s dwindling revenues have forced some money-losing papers to close, and papers that are for sale are having trouble finding buyers. Experts say that before long, a major American city could be left without a daily paper.

Here is the key paragraph from the related story:

“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.

Here is a quote from Joel Kramer:

“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

Right now the Times has approximately a circulation of about 1 million. To have it delivered can cost a subscriber as much as $600 a year.  What if The New York Times said we want to put the newsroom into a cooperative trust owned by its readers as it eases into the online world.

We own the newsroom, the New York Times owns everything else and the governance for the newsroom would remain much the way it has been in the past.

If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times paid $400 a year, just for it online, but also got shares into the cooperative, that would be $400 million a year. The Times newsroom costs about $200 million a year to operate. The extra $200 would go into an endowment, so in five years there would be a billion dollars, in ten years $2 billion. Enough that the subscription rate would go down for anyone who contributed for ten years. A ten year investment would be $4,000 or $2,000 less that what you pay for the newspaper now.

It would be like owning the Green Bay Packers, but it would be owning The New York Times’s newsroom. The larger company could do whatever it wants on the business side, but we would all own the newsroom and demand high quality news. Perhaps we would work out a deal that a certain percentage of the business side profits would go into the news endowment. Of course, the cooperative trust would be set up in a way that the Sam Zells of the world could never intrude.

Would I sign up, if asked today? Yes. Of course, the real test is — Would you?

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

I am most intrigued by the idea of no firewall but still a fee. Anyone can link to the stories and you can see the linked stories. However, if you want to read the entire site, then you have to be a subscriber. Blodget sets the fee at $80 a year. It’s an intriguing idea.

On making the cuts, I like the comment by Dan, who writes:

Today in The New York Times media critic David Carr wrote:

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

Here is what I wrote on January 12, 2007 exactly two years ago to the day:

Here is my biggest question. What will happen when only the journalism is left? It has grown out of a Christmas present I received. It is a small portable GPS. So I can walk about, tell it to find me the barbecue places or the department stores or the visitor center. In other words, what I might have needed a newspaper for in the past all pops up instantly in front of me when I need it and literally walks me to my destination step by step, street by street.

So who needs newspaper advertising if you have that, and, of course, soon everyone will have it in a more perfected form than we have now.

Today we have the iPhone and that is only a primitive example of what we will have in the future.

David Carr ended his piece today by saying:

Now all we need is a business model…

Well a week later in January 2007, I posted my manifesto of sorts called: The Need to Reinvent Journalism While We Can. In it I wrote about what we needed then and still need now. We need:

A model where everything goes back into paying for the journalism. High quality equipment, high quality reporters and editors paid an excellent wage, high quality connectivity with the communities served, and high quality journalism that helps the community members find their way, while always being ready to speak truth to power. We can do it.

Here he faults working journalists saying:

A lot of working journalists, and especially print journalists, are in the position of being sort of kept women. They don’t really understand where the money comes from but, you know, their particular sugar daddy seems pretty flush, so they just never gave it much thought. And then one day the market crashes and they suddenly discover, “Wait a minute, we were a business? And our revenues had to exceed our expenses every year? Why wasn’t I informed?”

And I think one of the reasons that journalists, in particular, are so stunned by this is not that they just didn’t happen to think about the previous business model, right? Like, why is it that the guy sitting in Mosul in a flak jacket is being subsidized by Bonwit Teller? You wouldn’t make this up from scratch, it just doesn’t make much sense. But, that’s just how the industry’s grown up. But they never thought those thoughts, because not only did they not have to, they were kind of encouraged not to. And so, I think at least part of the disorientation now isn’t just discovering the business model of print journalism today as a bad fit for the environment. It’s discovering that print journalism doesn’t survive without a business model at all. And that’s the legacy of the Chinese wall.

What will happen to journalists?

… what’s going to happen is, basically, the number of people who commit acts of journalism will rise enormously and the number of people who derive most, or all, of their income from acts of journalism is going to shrink. It’s just what happened to photographers with the spread of cameras. There’s just many, many, many, many more photos than there used to be. But it’s harder to make your living just by owning a nice camera and setting up in town and taking pictures of people’s kids. So, you know, I think that changed. And I think journalism is essentially next in line to see that change, to go through that change.

Quality will prevail, it will just take some time.

The average quality of something written is going to fall to the floor because of the volume of written material. But the competition will mean that the premium for having something especially interesting is going to rise. And then, over the course of the next ten years, we’ll sort ourselves out into some sort of new equilibrium. Five years ago, I think I would have bet on the newspapers as they exist today being a big part of that new equilibrium—but, you know, they’ve done very, very little and been really unimaginative. So now, I think, if I had to make the same bet, I’d say most newspapers aren’t going to survive. Every bit of concern around the Web is, “How can we raise revenues to our existing cost structure?” rather than “How can we lower our cost structure to meet our existing revenues?”