TEDChris: The Future of Newspapers

TEDChris from TED talks blogged about the future of newspapers.  

"Instead of, a national newspaper with, say, 600 journalists + 3m readers, you may end up with maybe 100 super-insightful news curators, columnists and analysts, aided by 10,000 citizen journalists/contributors/posters/commenters (and the new package will quite possibly reach 50m+ readers).

"But who will pay for foreign news bureaus, quality news gathering, etc.?" 

Well:

1) Today there's massive duplication

2) Some of the role can be taken up and possibly improved by carefully filtered citizen journalism... though the models for that not yet proven.

3) More importantly, in the long run I suspect basic news reporting will be regarded as a fundamental infrastructure of a democratic society and treated the same way as roads, water and electricity.  It'll be publicly funded and/or subsidized by visionary non-profit foundations. The dear old BBC is not a bad model."

This new model definitely equalizes the playing field for much more democratic and unbiased reporting with citizens watching their back the whole time.