Franklin Center is on the cutting edge of New Media Journalism, empowering the citizen journalist to engage in news reporting.  Howard Kurtz of CNN and has made note of the dramatic changes in the news business.  He has especially noticed the rise of groups that do what Franklin Center has started to master.  From the Washington Post online:

News organizations may be shrinking, as you have heard ad nauseam, but journalism is being revived and reinvented in some encouraging ways, a new report says.

Despite the “immediate disaster” striking newspapers, says Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, he was struck by “the really stunning enthusiasm and excitement of people engaged in many of these startups, who were just bubbling over with what they were doing.” Schudson wrote the report with Leonard Downie Jr., The Washington Post’s former executive editor who is now a professor at Arizona State University.

Their recommendations — particularly for a federally financed fund to subsidize local reporting — might not fly. But amid all the hand-wringing over newspaper deaths and bankruptcies, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” makes clear that a thousand media flowers are, if not blooming, at least popping up.(emphasis mine)

Franklin Center is one of those blooming flowers.  Already we have had success with Watchdog.org, Oklahoma Watchdog, Nebraska Watchdog, West Virginia Watchdog, and several others.  Our services will be one of those people will soon look to without a thought, when searching for online reporting on government activity.

These new ventures “are actually re-creating the kind of competition that used to exist in local news reporting a long time ago,” says Downie, now a Post Co. vice president at large. He’s not worried about their quality because “most of them have been started by seasoned professionals who used to work for newspapers. My greater concern is the fragility of their economic base.”

Some of the former newspaper and magazine journalists are acting out of necessity, others as mid-career entrepreneurs. Former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith has raised part of a $3.5 million budget from donors in the state, including T. Boone Pickens, to start the nonprofit Texas Tribune in Austin. Former Washington Post and Baltimore Sun reporter Fern Shen recently launched the Baltimore Brew blog, from her kitchen table, with other ex-Sun journalists….

I have been a fan of Howard Kurtz for a few years.  I think he has hit the nail on the head when it comes to the new world of journalism.  Please read the rest of his article here.