NP: John Cage, 4'33"

There have been several moves in the news business lately that, if taken together, might start to coalesce into an actual Internet-era business model for the media space.

First, Philip Anschutz's Examiner.com bought NowPublic. I'm not a huge fan of "citizen journalism" as the be-all end-all of new media reporting, the way some advocates are, but as we saw during the Iran elections, it's clearly a component. It's a middle ground between what Roger Cohen opined about recently and what he cites of Arianna Huffington's argument against his position. I think the role of journalism is, as Cohen notes, to bear witness, but bearing witness to the voice of the people via these new channels is as important as bearing witness to the events themselves. If you can effectively curate all of that raw material -- drink the from the firehose of tweets and blog posts as well as the things those people are tweeting and blogging about -- you have a leg up in this race.

While that side of the equation is expanding, the more traditional role is contracting, if the consolidation of sports desks within the Tribune corporation is any indication. It probably is, and with that shrinking and consolidation comes a degradation of quality that some are already noticing. To fill this gap, I wonder if we're going to see an emergence of more third parties for this kind of thing, and a while ago, Mark Cuban suggested that sort of model for sports coverage, where the beat reporting is actually owned by the leagues themselves and distributed to the papers.

That ownership model may not scale with regard to non-sports reporting, because of obvious conflicts of interest. However, the rise of third-party sites like Politico and Talking Points Memo -- who picked up a major investment from no less than Marc Andreessen a little while back -- might start to serve that role on political matters. And while suspicion of bias may look like an issue in this arena, recent polls are showing more and more that a majority of people don't trust news sources that are not aligned with their ideologies already.

Now, this may all be well and good for big topics like sports, politics and entertainment, but the question is whether or not it scales down to smaller niches. Which may be where the Examiner deal becomes interesting, but there's danger in using the unfiltered feed of citizen journalism. If you want a good example, look at American soccer coverage, where fans have filled in the gap in coverage of the sport with their efforts, but there's no quality control that would be afforded by knowledgeable experts who sit above that noisy layer. The results can be maddeningly amateurish and ill-informed, and within the niche, it seems to be getting more and more entrenched. Then again, you could say the same thing about the right-wing media machine.

I keep coming back to this idea of the mainstream media serving almost purely as filters for the raw news, with that raw news coming from a wider variety of sources. This allows for consumer loyalty to both the filters and the sources if they show they know what they're doing. We're still looking at building trust between presenter and audience, but the dimensions of that trust may have shifted. So, this isn't really that much different from how it works now, and it still doesn't address how anyone gets paid. Of course, everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Google is working on that side of the equation as well.

There's also the matter of delivery, and on that front, I don't think Google's Fast Flip looks like the answer.