What should government do to help journalism? NOTHING. Since their definition of journalism seems to be these formerly fatcat publishers who looted the newspaper industry and then were too dumb to see what journalism was becoming giving any money to these same pigs who laid off everybody but kept the worst faux journalists who were sniveling coward kiss-but hacks is criminal. They want to help journalism? Give aid to innovative new era online outlets such as http://www.92067freepress.com in a public outreach venue. Don’t give money to the morons who stole the actual journalists’ production, made huge profits up to the 2000s and then gutted the industry.

Those comments are also in reaction to only a small subset of broader suggestions made by Downie and Schudson. That subset, “A national Fund for Local News,” has now somehow spun off to mean a TARP fund for the New York Times. Which, in my own intrepretation, isn’t the point at all.

In the meantime, if put in context and carried to a logical conclusion, some of the Downie/Schudson suggestions for sane legislation go missing. Including:

- A clarification of IRS tax rules for low-cost Limited Liability Companies currently in legal limbo.

- Some kind of guidelines so that federal, state and local government can provide data and reporting of their activities in a standard non-proprietary format.

Personally, I think the Fund for Local News idea is off-target, but mostly not for reasons which have anything to do with bailout subsidies and journalism ethics. Those are sideshows. The real deal is that content providers and news consumers are currently being held hostage by an effective telco/cable duopoly which controls pricing, deployment, bandwidth, and effectively innovation for next generation news delivery systems. A duopoly which has also declared itself in opposition to Net Neutrality, and which, at least in the case of the telcos, has been knee-deep in the public subsidy trough for decades in return for vague promises to improve infrastructure.

That the news business tends to be clueless about such technological issues is not surprising, and is probably one of the main reasons the technorati discount the media’s ability to spot shifts in the technical tectonics. One evident reason for this is that the news business also tends to be a consumer of technology and not an innovator of it. By the time journalists spot a trend, those responsible for creating it have moved on to something else.

It also seems to me that it would be a mistake to assume that in order for the news business to advance that it needs to abandon its traditionally held newsroom wisdom about standards and ethics. That would be making a false assumption that we’re playing some sort of zero-sum game. The reality is probably closer to the idea that ethics make good business sense going forward, but that sustainable strategies and tactics are weak on the revenue stream side. Ethical or otherwise.