In estimating last fall that at least $1.6 billion annually in news effort from newspapers has disappeared, I posed the question of how much of that deficit is being covered by new media efforts.
Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Knight Foundation's J-Lab, offered a good first pass at an answer in a speech she gave last month at USC Annenberg.
Schaffer said that she has documented $142 million in grants to news start-up projects from individuals and foundations since 2005. That squares with my take that the new ventures are growing explosively, but do not come close yet to picking up the slack from downsized newsrooms.
Schaffer continued, making the important point that there are hundreds of citizen sites providing basic community government coverage in a spirit of stewardship, essentially as "a labor of love." The coverage doesn't make money, but since when do community volunteers expect to be paid?
My colleagues at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism came up with added evidence in that vein in a study of citizen sites to be published Monday as part of "State of the News Media 2010."
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