Everyone knows from American history class that the First Amendment is the great protector of press freedom in the United States, barring Congress from "abridging" the sacred right to publish what you want to publish.

So does that means there's a constitutional wall that separates government and the press, just as it separates church and state?

Not exactly. Contrary to popular perception, the Constitution has not prevented the government from being a supporter of the press, and in fact it has been a generous benefactor since the founding of the country.

In a report issued at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, my colleague Geoffrey Cowan and I concluded that federal, state and local governments have contributed billions of dollars a year to the commercial news business.

This article appeared as an op-ed in the Sunday, Dec. 13, edition of Newsday.

Will news nonprofits bankrolled by foundations and philanthropists be pillars of the future media ecology?  To judge by the fast decline of mainstream media's business model, and the fast rise in philanthropy-funded journalism, it's starting to look that way.

This has been an extraordinary year for the creation of new-media organizations and Web sites, and a big reason is the money that foundations and wealthy individuals are investing. Thousands of community news sites have been launched, and most of the prominent ones are nonprofits.  Just in the last month or so we've seen launch announcements about the Bay Area News Project (with $5 million from Warren Hellman), the Texas Tribune ($4 million from John Thornton and others) and the Chicago News Co-operative (grant money from several foundations).

One of them is fueled by a $2 million investment and embarked on a plan to establish community news network in 50 American cities.  Another is a south Los Angeles site serving a neighborhood just 1 square mile in geography.    One has been in the community news business for six years; another is just now starting to monetize his site.

These were among the news sites represented at Friday's "Entrepreneurship and the Community Web" conference at the University of Southern California.  To my knowledge, anyway, it was the first time a large group of community news sites had ever gotten together in California.  It was obviously overdue.  The participants fed off each other's zest for their work, and left Los Angeles with a productive list of good ideas.  You can watch the entire daylong meeting here -- and read another account by analyst Peter Krasilovsky here.

Remarks prepared for delivery Dec. 1 at Federal Trade Commission workshop on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?"

Today, anyone can aspire to be a news provider, and increasingly, people and organizations are deciding that’s exactly what they want to be. It’s this process -- many voices instead of few -- that is fundamentally transforming our news ecology. 

The new players come in all sizes and forms, including the traditional for-profit model.  I'll focus here on nonprofits and also on non-news organizations that are quickly emerging as news producers.  These newcomers are not making up for all the resources shed by mainstream media.  But they are making up for a significant, perhaps growing, share.  And in places like San Diego and New Haven, you can argue that a more robust news environment has already taken hold.

(Note: The following are notes made for remarks at Thursday's conference at Shorenstein on "How to Make Money in News." I spoke briefly about foundation-funded journalism and made a special note about the emerging non-news organizations.)

I’m going to talk briefly about another of the missions of Geoff Cowan's center (the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy) and of USC Annenberg and that is  the nonprofit new-media sector, including operations financed by foundations and other philanthropy.  I also want to mention an emerging model that’s worth watching: the non-news organizations.

These days none of us can avoid seeing how fast foundation-funded journalism is growing:  Just in the last week there have been grant announcements from MacArthur for the Chicago News Co-Op; from the Bullitt Foundation for InvestigateWest; and, this announcement that made us would-be grantees perk up, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for Crosscut Seattle.  (Later note: Bob Giles added the Hechinger Institute's new role in education reporting.)

Russ Stanton is one of my favorite people. Imagine the stereotype of a reserved, slightly stuffy big-city editor and that's not Russ.The editor of the Los Angeles Times for the last 20 months, Stanton is uncommonly down to earth and available. But the main reason I like him is his public honesty. Stanton's default response is to tell the truth -- something that doesn't come easily to most executives struggling to keep their enterprise alive. Asked earlier this year how many news staffers could be sustained if the Times went Web only, Stanton could have been forgiven for taking a pass. He didn't. The answer, he said, was 150.

So when Stanton visited our USC Annenberg graduate class last night, "Entrepreneurship in the New Media," I believed him when he said he's bullish about prospects for the Los Angeles Times, even as it sits in Chapter 11 with huge questions looming about its future.

The headlines from last month's meeting of investigative reporting profits focused on one thing – their formation of a network to support investigative reporting and provide a showcase for the groups' work.

The new organization, for now called the Investigative News Network, could be a big deal, and the 10 members of its steering committee went right to work getting it up and running.

But another big theme rumbled through the meeting outside New York City at the Rockefeller estate, and that was the nonprofits' mad dash for new revenue models.  "My personal passion is sustainability," said MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer.  By the end of the meeting, nearly all of the roughly three dozen participants had said a version of the same thing.

The cause of investigative reporting is hot right now, and many new groups have caught the attention of foundations.  But they fear this money could fade quickly, so there's an urgency about their exploration of new revenue models. A bunch of new ideas, some already in practice, flew around the room.

How hot is the world of nonprofit investigative reporting these days?  Hot enough to make Jon Sawyer, who runs an international reporting shop, full of envy at this week's gathering on investigative reporting outside New York City.

"We'd like to see the same energy in international reporting that we see on the investigative side," said Sawyer, director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

As was true at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, this week's meeting of investigative reporting nonprofits generated an unmistakable energy field.  Which is an amazing thing, given how desperate the plight of investigative journalism seemed just 18 months ago.

Today, a nonprofit group featuring or specializing in watchdog reporting is being created almost every month -- a pace that emboldened leaders to take the first step this week toward creating a network connecting these mostly  startup groups. Participants established a steering committee that swings into action immediately after the July 4 holiday, with Goal No. 1 being securing foundation support for a planning grant.

A group of investigative reporting nonprofits has endorsed formation of a new umbrella organization aimed at sustaining the burgeoning investigative nonprofit movement and bringing new prominence to its journalism.

A resolution, "Pocantico Declaration: Creating a Nonprofit Investigative News Network,"  was approved Wednesday by a diverse group of nonprofit leaders – established organizations like the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as newcomers like Texas Watchdog and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

The group's mission will be to "aid and abet, in every conceivable way, individually and collectively, the work and public reach of its member news organizations, including … their administrative, editorial and financial well-being."  Here's the full text of the resolution.

Before they head for home Wednesday, about three dozen participants at an investigative reporting summit in New York are likely to launch planning for new organization uniting the growing number of nonprofits producing investigative journalism. 

The new network, dubbed for now the "Investigative News Network," would be another significant step in the rise of nonprofit investigative journalism in recent years.  Chuck Lewis, the godfather of so much in investigative journalism,  called the initiative "truly historic."

At a conference outside Tarrytown, N.Y., Lewis laid out a possible scenario Tuesday for how the network might take shape:  Secure a planning grant that would extend for up to a year; establish a new Web site displaying members' work; and begin posting content within 6-12 months.  By the end of the year, he said, the organization would need to be established as a 501(c)3.  Lewis predicted  said the organization would inevitably go international.

What exactly is the gathering of investigative reporting nonprofits, now under way in Tarrytown, N.Y., trying to achieve?

Ostensibly, it's creation of an Investigative News Network -- a coming together of the growing universe of investigative reporting nonprofits.  As Bill Buzenberg, director of the Center for Public Integrity, said at dinner last night, "Imagine what a 50-state network (of investigative nonprofits) might achieve?"

But as the conference swings into gear this morning, it's clear there are many different ideas of what the mission or missions of such a network might be.  In Monday's opener -- a fascinating round of introductions from the 39 people in attendance -- several possibilities were put on the table, most centering around the new-media model of partnerships:

Tom Brokaw anchored NBC's "Nightly News" for 21 years.  He traveled the world, covered 9/11, interviewed heads of state and followed Ronald Reagan's political career  from beginning to end.  His legacy, he said Wednesday, will probably involve none of that.

Brokaw told an audience at the Los Angeles Public Library that his "single greatest contribution" will probably be his bestselling book, "The Greatest Generation."  He talked about how on the flight to Los Angeles, two flight attendants gave him handwritten notes telling him how much the book had meant to him, how it had made them see their fathers in an entirely different way.

Eleven years after publication of the book, which profiled the Americans who fought In World War II, Brokaw says "The Greatest Generation" still evokes reactions like that two or three times a week, sometimes every day.

You needn't look far to find skepticism about the potential of foundations and philanthropists to bankroll the work that newspapers have long done. Conventional wisdom is that funders of nonprofits can make only a marginal difference, that the real answers will come from private sector innovators.

But these skeptics aren't much found in evidence at the nation's leading investigative reporting nonprofits.

The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting are all on the move, all seeing growing opportunities for nonprofit investigative work, all hopeful about future funding.

With mainstream media continuing to feel the crush of declining revenues, the nonprofits are seeing demand for their work rising. And, in a scenario few thought possible, the cold calls are sometimes coming from the opposite direction – from foundations wondering if they might play a role in financing investigative reporting.

Can Human Rights Watch, the NGO that's eyeing a significant role in the world of journalism, muster the credibility needed to deliver the news even as it acts as advocate for human rights?

That's the kind of question journalists sometimes ask when they hear that NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others are aspiring to fill some of the void created by the shrinkage of news operations.  But it's not a question that concerns Carroll Bogert.

"I would say that in general, we do much more than journalists do to assure we have the facts right," said Bogert, Human Rights Watch's associate director.

As Human Rights Watch ramps up a strategy to use its vast, worldwide research to fill growing gaps in news coverage, Bogert's concern is a different one – and it's something that might surprise journalists.    The fact is that some of the nonprofit's 75-80 researchers aren't thrilled with the idea of seeing their work translated, in-house, into journalism.

Alex Jones has led one of the nation's most successful nonprofits on politics and the press for nearly nine years.  Like many people, though, he doesn't think the fundamental answer to the news media's precipitous slide will be found in the largess of philanthropists and foundations.

"The solution to what's happening to news media these days is going to be a commercial one," said Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

There are two exceptions, though, and one of them is a big one.

Jones wants one or more of the world's richest people to establish a $2 billion endowment that would provide permanent funding for PBS' "NewsHour."

CBS anchor Katie Couric strongly defended her 2008 campaign interviews of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, telling a Los Angeles audience Wednesday that her questioning of the GOP vice presidential candidate struck a blow for "old-fashioned" journalism.

Expressing concern about the growing popularity of opinion journalism on TV -- which she said amounted to "ideological convection" -- Couric said the interviews worked because she kept ideology out of it.  "I did it the old-fashioned way," she said.

Couric accepted a Cronkite Award at the University of Southern California for her Palin interviews.  Other Cronkite awards, presented by the Norman Lear Center, went to George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC's "This Week," to the public television news program NOW, with host David Brancaccio, and to several local TV news organizations.

A few of my newspaper editor friends have tweaked me recently about the reporting I've done on community news Web sites.  All had the same question:  Given these sites' mostly tiny size (audience, news content, revenue), haven't I been hyping their impact a bit?

It's a fair question.  So is a related one that also comes up.  Aren't many of these sites likely to fail because, despite valiant efforts by their creators, they'll be unable to generate sustainable advertising revenue?

Since coming to USC Annenberg last fall, I've reported extensively on the rise of community Web sites, in posts at OJR like this and, more recently, this.  I've been impressed with the smarts and commitment of people like Joel Kramer at MinnPost and Margie Freivogel at St. Louis Beacon,  and many others across the country who are rapidly joining the online parade.

Given the fact that many newspapers seem headed toward nonprofit status anyway, it's perhaps not surprising that someone would try to make it official.

Legislation introduced this week by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland would enable newspapers to establish themselves as tax-exempt nonprofits and qualify for significant expense savings courtesy of Uncle Sam.  Under the Cardin measure, they wouldn't have to pay income taxes on income derived from advertising sales.  That's a big difference from existing IRS regulations, which customarily extract federal income taxes on advertising revenue derived by nonprofits.  (There are a number of exceptions to this, including one that allows student publications to escape advertising-related income taxes.)

While Cardin's legislation probably qualifies as a longshot, at least anytime soon, it kicks into play an interesting public policy question as newspapers increasingly head to bankruptcy court or worse: Is there a role for government here that would help protect citizens' news and information needs?

For the beleaguered news industry, there's a rare upward trendline as it approaches next week's  Freedom of Information observance.  Congress passed a Freedom of Information Act upgrade last year.  A new federal shield law seems within grasp.  And President Obama is promising the most transparent government in history.

But on Monday, Lucy Dalglish will carry a decidedly un-sunny message to Florida's FOI Day celebration:  The declining fortunes of mainstream media, she will say, could cripple efforts to fight government secrecy and preserve openness.

"The last 45 to 50 years, these critical issues have been led by the mainstream media," said Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press.  If they no longer can afford that expensive fight, she said, "I don't see that bloggers are going to be able to pick it up."

I've just helped judge a journalism contest for my alma mater, McClatchy, and have a couple of observations to report: 

First, don't believe those who argue that newspapers' investigative reporting is so minimal that it's easily replaced. It isn't small, and if newspapers couldn't do it anymore, the void would be very deep.  Second, high-quality watchdog reporting isn't simply the province of big national players doing "secret prisons" or "secret eavesdropping" stories.  It's also the heart and soul of newsrooms across the country that keep watch over their communities and regions.

I say these things not primarily to brag about the work of my former colleagues -- though I'm honored to do so.  I say it because the experience of reading this work of 29 McClatchy papers (covering the last half of 2008) was so at odds with the critiques I often read about newspapers today. 

The media revolution has reached a new and important stage: The American public is being let in on the discussion.

In the last two weeks articles in the New York Times and Time magazine have helped push the question of "whither news media" before a much bigger audience.  I say it's about time.

Of course, it's not as if the industry's increasingly dire business outlook has been a secret. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings of Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star Tribune were plenty telling. So was the Detroit newspapers' decision to limit home delivery to three days a week.

But in many respects the public's understanding of the upheaval under way in the news business has been limited. And that's a problem, because the future of news and information isn't just an issue for the New York Times or CBS or the hometown newspaper, but for American citizens who need accurate information to keep the nation and their hometowns on track.

New media thinker Jay Rosen has been using the work of press scholar Daniel C. Hallin to explain how the Internet has eroded journalists' traditional power to define what issues are legitimate for proper debate. Hallin wrote that journalists tend to place public issues into three categories:  a sphere of consensus, a sphere of legitimate controversy and a sphere of deviance.  In a post on his blog, Press Think, Rosen argued that the press has done a lousy, unthinking job of deciding what goes into each category, and that through the Internet American citizens might assume this role for themselves.

But an interesting thing happened.  Hallin wrote a long response for the blog, and made it clear he wasn't exactly on the same page as Rosen.  He said there's plenty of reason to be skeptical that the Internet "is closer to 'real public opinion' than what is in the mainstream media." Further, he said journalists play an "important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I'd like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one."

Journalists, accountants and bankruptcy experts found accord Thursday on the No. 1 issue facing Tribune Co. as it begins its Chapter 11 bankruptcy adventure:  It isn't owner Sam Zell.  It isn't the company's huge indebtedness.  The question, said Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton, is "whether this is a viable business."

In one way, Stanton told a gathering at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, the answer is already clear.  "I think big-city newspapers, the way we have known them, are not long for this world, as they're now configured."

The editor of the Tampa Tribune, Janet Coats, got the attention of her Facebook friends last Saturday when she posted this message: "Janet is preparing to fire a shot over the bow." I figured Janet's staff at the Tribune was about to score a scoop in the Sunday paper. But a quick check of Tampa Bay Online didn't turn up anything that matched her provocative post.

Then I saw it. "This Newspaper Is Fighting Back." And before I read on, a quick word came to mind: "Yes!!"

They may be moving too ineptly and too slowly, but newspapers are confronting the reality that their longtime role as gatekeeper of information has reached an end.  My former boss, McClatchy's Howard Weaver, used to put it this way:  Some newspapers are still standing guard at the gate; problem is, because of the Internet, the fences are all down.

One of the results is that the old days of one-way communication - the newspaper telling its readers what was important, take it or leave it - are fading away.  Two-way communication is the order of the day.  But only now are those of us who've spent our lives in the media coming to grips with what that means:  It doesn't just mean readers and listeners get to talk; it doesn't just mean that the media listens; it also means that their feedback is acted upon.

The financial press has been taking it on the chin lately for its coverage of the nation's economic mess. Some of it's well-earned. At least several financial writers have acknowledged they should have asked more questions about the long period of easy credit, soaring asset prices and ever-growing leverage on Wall Street. To my eye, the criticism is overcooked.