The extra reading for this week from the New York Times brought up an interesting solution for newspapers' decline in revenue. The article entitled "News You Can Endow" by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt states that endowing newspapers would help save them from extinction. Swensen and Schmidt defended their argument well and the idea sounds good on paper. Endowed newspapers would mean independent news sources and an end to their financial problems. With reporters indebted to their sources to conitnually get the new story and a lack of investiagtive journalism in today's media, maybe this would allow for a free-thinking, independent media. Also it does sound like it would solve the problem of how newspaper will make money by making them non-profit.
However, who would endow the papers? Swensen and Schmidt compare it to endowing colleges and unverisities. Newspapers though important may not hold the same necessity as an education does for endowers.
Also, Swensen and Schmidt disregard the fact that although the web does contain a lot of false information, it is also a new frontier that newspapers can consider. They did mention that newspapers do not make enough revenue from the Internet but that is because it is a small part of newspapers' outlet. Maybe if they marketed their news differently or used many different types of multimedia, they could be making money.
It would be interesting to see how it would play out if we tried to make newspapers not-fot-profit. Putting this into action though is another thing and would require a lot of change and cooperation from many different people. It probably is not a change we will see in the near future but I think it is something to question and even consider.
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