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An “exploding Market”, if you ask Jeff Jarvis. Read this post from his trip to the National Association of Broadcasters/Radio Television News Directors Association convention in Vegas. Click on the assorted links, watch the videos. There is a synergy there.

Think about what you could do with 5 million dollars, let alone $14 million. Seriously, I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of my readers are smarter than Katie Couric. But she gets the big bucks to “work 22 minutes a night, reading what someone else has written for you. By the way, in every other journalistic endeavor we would call that plagiarism. Only in television do we deign to call it ‘journalism’. There is a rationale that these people somehow earn their pornographic salaries.” (~Michael Rosenblum)

Jarvis says that “infrastructure is the enemy of journalism“. I would have to agree:

Feed the web with reporting.

If you get rid of the presses and the trucks and the broadcast towers and the headquarters buildings and the fancy equipment and the old-time stars, if you kill the infrastructure, you are left with more resources for journalism — and savings in the face of reduced revenue in a suddenly competitive marketplace — and the bottom line is a and more efficient and sustainable business.

Who is not for an efficient and sustainable business? Look at what bloggers and amateur “journalists” did to Dan Rather when he based a news story on those phony documents (Disclaimer: I am not discussing any alleged motives, bias or political agendas here, just the facts!!!!). Look at the first news reports out of Virginia Tech, the 7/7 tube attacks in London, the footage that seems to pop up weekly of someone doing something they shouldn’t - and being captured by camera phone.

Put these (and better) tools in the hands of professional journalists and see what happens. There is an awful lot of expertise out there, waiting for someone to harness it. Advertising and Marketing were among the first to undergo these painful (for them) Web 2.0 changes, and they aren’t even finished changing.

TV news is the next Goliath that will have to face the Army of Davids.

Let’s hear it, dear readers, what kind of web-based news organization could you put together with a $5 million/year budget?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/66plmq. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen