Bill Baker: Is there a nonprofit future for American journalism?

By Edward J. Delaney

William F. Baker, the longtime executive at New York’s PBS stations, is temporarily here at Harvard as a senior research Fellow at the Kennedy School’s the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Not long ago, he led a discussion whose title was “The Future of Journalism,” but which — like a lot of those talks these days — spent a lot of time on the industry’s current problems. Here’s a four-minute highlight reel, followed by some notes about the proceedings:

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Morning Links: December 1, 2008

By Joshua Benton

— An interview with Joi Ito that serves as a decent introduction to Creative Commons. “We are now shifting from what I call the ‘delivery problem’ to the ‘discovery problem.’ Whereas the difficulty use to lie in the mechanics of getting the product to the user, now the challenge is getting the attention of the customer.”

— Germany’s Spiegel launches an alliance with a Netherlands daily to “launch a Europe-wide network of publishers of high-quality journalism on national, European and international affairs in the English language.” An interesting idea: Use the quality journalism of an array of non-English papers to create an alternative to the usual media players in the U.S. and U.K.

— How do you get people to agree to watch a two-minute commercial? Hulu is getting users to volunteer for it.

— This NYT Mag piece examines how the advertising industry is dealing with the same loss-of-control issues the news industry is. Nothing in here makes me particularly optimistic there’s a model to steal; the bit about the overalls comes off as pathetic.