I hope we can continue civilly after this- here goes, regardless.

There are boatloads of bloggers reporting and commenting for free. Some subset will take happily take money for reporting on the Dumpwater City Council meeting.

Don’t overstate the need for training. Their job is to bring back information. Your job is to display it. Lots of people have jobs involving the collection of information, and Strunk and White don’t figure in to what they do. You should care only about accuracy and completeness.

J-school types don’t want to do rewrite? Too bad. Here’s a solution- make rewrite the highest paying job in the reporting cycle.

Liability may be a strawman- someone will set up an AP-like feeder company for this, I think.

I guess the bottom line is that all your concerns don’t matter- the world is moving on.

And Uncle Fester, there are huge problems with using the system you suggest — I know, because I’m an editor who has to use that type of a network to cover our extended publication area. Finding folks without an agenda who want to do the job is hard enough — finding ones with some degree of training and ability is even harder. Most “volunteer journalists” we see want to start off as columnists or cover something “fun” — not city council meetings, and not at the pay rates offered. Print journalism — at least off the coasts — is a pretty low-paying field, and part-time journalism pays even worse.

Using that type of coverage model would require experienced people in a newsroom to do rewriting, and most experienced j-folks don’t want to play that game. Fact checking, while necessary, delays getting the copy into print (these “volunteers” already have trouble meeting deadlines because they have other jobs and responsibilities) and leads to complaints from readers that we’re not covering their communities in a timely fashion.

It also exposes newspapers to huge liability concerns, depending on how the states’ they are in view the business arrangement between paper and “volunteer journalist.” My state views them as independent contractors, which shields us a bit, but I’m living in mortal terror of being sued when something wrong slips by us. I don’t have the same dread involving my full-time reporters, because they know if they screw up that badly it’s the end of their careers.

I think a fine business model for newspapers would be to have a reporting staff of comprised heavily of stringers/volunteers/experts who work on a per-article basis.

The paper’s full-time editorial employees would be fact checkers and re-write people.

I am sure the argument will be that these folks are all biased, etc, but how bad can it be relative to the existing crop?

You are right.

Only investing in your core business, and there is no more core business than the newsrooms, you will survive.

Investing in the newsrooms means:

First, get in the bus the right people.

Second, get out the bus the wrong people.

Third, seat in the right seats the right people.

And then let´s discuss where are we going and if we need more people.

Instead, newspapers are just cutting, cutting, cutting for the sake of the numbers, and no proper review of the quality of our talent is done, starting from the top.

If you want to save money in a newsroom just fire some of the editors: with one bad editor out you can hire five young talented reporters and still make savings…

HR is crucial, but in our newspapers it is just the legal department for hiring and firing.

No progresive and creative HR policies.

Talent, talent, talent is what we need.

“End of discussion” means I am not interest in yor opinions, ideas or comments.

Well, he works for The Washington Post and CNN, not the best examples of interactive media.

And as a “columnist” and not a blogger, he does not takes comments or questions from readers.

He is is God.

But he is wrong.