By Peter Osnos
The Atlantic

All across America this winter, there are news-gathering start-ups with an array of business models reflecting the energy of an industry in reinvention rather than the dying newspaper trade that has become–while worse-off than anyone would like–an exaggerated cliché. Nonetheless, my back of the envelope calculation of the total investment in this national transformation of the news business is still a fraction of the bonuses Wall Street is paying itself for surviving the government bail-out (and not a whole lot more than NBC paid Conan O’Brien to go away). So here’s an argument for those with the money to spend to do much more to support an entrepreneurial movement of enormous social potential.

Digging into one week’s worth of items culled from Romenesko (the indispensable aggregator of news about journalism) provides a glimpse of what is going on:

• The Connecticut Mirror was just launched as a state-wide news source focused on coverage of government and public policy. Led by Michael Regan, a twenty-year veteran of the Hartford Courant and James A. Cutie, a former executive at The New York Times, the operation has raised $1.8 million from seven foundations; enough says Cutie, to operate for three years. I live in Connecticut, and a year or so ago, the respected and popular Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Christopher Dodd, told me that his job as the state’s leading official advocate on behalf of consumers and the environment was being undermined by the elimination of reporting positions that wrote about his areas of concern. The challenge for the Connecticut Mirror–indeed, for most of the new ventures–is to convert start-up funding, which is relatively more available these days, into sustaining revenues for a website that, once operational is subject to scrutiny and criticism.

• MinnPost.com in Minneapolis reduced its deficit in its second full year to $125,000 and said it had 60 percent higher page views in 2009 for a total of 5 million visits. I met Joel Kramer, editor and CEO, a former publisher of the Minneapolis Star and one of the earliest leaders in digital news gathering, last spring. Based on his report, Kramer and his colleagues have made good progress in the myriad of financial issues he faced then. “2009 was a very tough year to be a news publisher, a non-profit organization or a start-up enterprise,” he wrote, “MinnPost was all three. Given that backdrop, we had a remarkable year.”

As a co-founder and chair of the advisory board of the new Chicago News Cooperative, which began supplying two pages of news twice weekly to The New York Times in November and is now intensely focused on adding resources towards a fully realized goal for metropolitan reporting and membership based news interest groups, I can attest to the extraordinary efforts necessary to make these enterprises viable–work that can’t really be conveyed in reports intended to show progress and not the stresses of getting there. But so much is going on in all these projects and they are so much more developed than they were a year ago that even die-hard pessimists would have to acknowledge that journalism at every level is not giving up–for all the dire realities of bankruptcies, layoffs, and depleted coverage in so many areas.

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