In the digital age, carving slogans — even seemingly timeless ones — on the wall might come back to bite you. Case in point: Inside the rotunda of the School of Journalism’s Lee Hills Hall is the statement that “Advertising is the fuel of free enterprise and a free press.” Although the 1995 building is still new by institutional standards, the advertising-as-fuel analogy is starting to look old-fashioned when it comes to the press. Advertising in newspapers is down, many papers have closed, and remaining news staffs are shrinking. The U.S. press, while still free, is much diminished in its ability to protect citizens’ freedoms, says Charles Davis, associate professor of journalism and winner of a 2010 John Aubuchon Freedom of the Press Award.
Mentioned later in the article is 2010-2011 Reynolds Fellow David Cohn:
Founder David Cohn, an RJI fellow and former technology reporter for Wired, borrowed an approach from humanitarian groups such as kiva.org that let donors specify the recipients of their money. For instance, a kiva.org lender could send $25 to a particular aspiring entrepreneur in, say, an African village.
Mentioned later in the article is 2008-2009 Reynolds Fellow Bill Densmore:
RJI fellow Bill Densmore also is working to connect readers to information they want and to see that journalists get paid. But his “networked” model is more akin to paying for information with a credit card than donating to an info-charity.
The short version of Densmore’s model looks like this: The website of a local newspaper acts as a reader’s virtual home base for local news, and it also aggregates national and international news specific to individual preferences. Readers subscribe at one site, which gives them access to content at many other sites.
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