I had expected more from the Columbia report given the buildup. Instead, it seemed to be mostly a summary of what anyone following the ceaseless hand-wringing would know. And rather than try to create a product that people want and seek innovative business models, the authors think the answer is to go begging for handouts.

There was a lot of talk in the report about saving “newsrooms.” But I saw no insights or apparent work to understand what audiences actually want from those newsrooms.

Why would anyone look to newspaper execs for answers about future of news? They led the industry into this mess.

Here’s how gov’t can help journalism: Increase salaries for schoolteachers. More readers = bigger mkt for news.

Here’s y u can’t find profitable news sites that look like newspapers: because those sites *don’t* look like newspapers.

As part-Native American, current talk from newspaper execs sounds like a 21st-century Ghost Dance: http://bit.ly/47UeFM

Now, indulge me more than 140 characters a whack to explain further:

Leonard Downie Jr. has served as one of the industry’s top newsmen. Michael Schudson is an outstanding scholar. But journalists have been publishing on the Internet for 15 years now. A generation of news managers and scholars has had more than a decade to confront the what should have been an obvious impending erosion of newspaper revenue due to online competition.

That generation instead chose to look for ways to reinforce newspapers’ monopoly power over the access to and publication of the news, or to find new ways to fund existing news operations and procedures. (And, often, both.)

That generation chose to ignore, marginalize or even demonize voices who argued that the news industry must change its procedures, in both editorial and business operations, to compete online. So a decade of innovation and market power was wasted, as news industry managers, abetted by academic indifference, chose instead to pine for their “old ways.”

And now, when newspapers are closing and others have lost 90 percent of their value (or more), top news company managers are working their way through the stages of grief. We’ve had our decade of denial. Now we’re into the anger and bargaining, with those further down the payscale confronting depression.

The zeal with which some managers are embracing already-discredited or unrealistic ideas (“Paywalls will save us!” “E-readers will save us!” “Bailouts will save us!”) reminds me of what I’ve read about the “Ghost Dance” movement among Native American tribes in the late 1800s. (Here’s a description.) Beaten and desperate, many American Indians then turned to the Ghost Dance with evangelical fervor, believing that dance, songs and magical shirts would protect them from the white man’s bullets.

They didn’t, of course, and free native tribes succumbed to life on the reservation.

The news organizations that prosper and serve the public interest in the 21st century will not look nor operate like the newspapers of the 20th. Those who create and lead these organizations will not be the same individuals who for years have been featured speakers at NAA at AEJMC conferences, or whose names impress the boards and tenured faculty at what have been the nation’s top j-schools.

If the folks at Columbia and other j-schools want to charge their friends with writing reports about the future of journalism, go ahead. But if journalism schools really want to learn what will happen to this field in the years to come, they need to diversify the voices with which they have been engaging.

Tomorrow does not belong to Downie or Schudson, however impressive their work has been in the past. It belongs people such as Rafat Ali, Adrian Holovaty, Markos Moulitsas, Howard Owens and Lisa Stone – a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, who ought to be the folks that institutions such as Columbia look to for guidance about the future of journalism.