I ran across this article in The Atlantic magazine written by James Fallows. While the focus, initially, talks about saving newspapers it does go on to talk about helping other media giants like those in television and radio circles. Could there be a monetization solution in Google? Should there be? Here's the introductory paragraph. Please read on to see more of his argument. Mr. Fallows' blog is attached to link on his name above and he has a summary of the article's main points on the blog.

Let me know your thoughts.

How to Save the News

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.

By James Fallows

I traveled to Rhode Island on a mission. I lived in the state for 2 and a half years - many years ago. My return was prompted because of my master's program and something one of my former colleagues was doing. I had heard Jim Hummel had left the TV station where we both worked to launch an online news site.