The Guardian's Roy Greenslade has written one of those time-to-get-real columns about the challenges for print media. Greenslade says the time for retrospective complaint is done --- it's time for necessary cuts and planning for the way journalism will be created.

Greenslade worries that the economic recession is going to make it difficult to save print or digital, that the loss of journalism will be a profound loss for society, and that it's time for survival plans.

"If we want to ensure that our communities are not bamboozled by politicians and trampled on by big business, we have to preserve journalism. And, for the moment, that means preserving newspapers in their current form in order to provide the springboard to an online future."

Among other things, he believes incumbent journalists need to be training citizen journalists. Publishers and journalists need to be working together.

It has been interesting the last few days to study the emerging ideas from the Revenue Two Point Zero exercise looking for new financial models for journalism.

A group of journalists and news managers has been focusing on four principal areas:
Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as the iPhone.
Create a better Craigslist.
Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.
Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.
Its process to date is developing some common-sensical notions for change, and it's worth keeping abreast of what it does.

AdAge is reporting that big media have been asking Google to rank their results higher --- in essence, to skip the challenging search engine optimization process and jump the queue.

They're unhappy with Google's algorithm and believe those who pay for the content ought to be at the head of the pack --- or get some sort of recognition in the mix of page rankings. In other words, stronger recognition for original over derivative work.

It'll be an interesting point to watch as the debate continues on firewalls, on Google's obligations, and on the economic challenges of media.

On Techcrunch, guest contributor Eric Clemons of the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania has the kind of posting that feels every bit as threatening/breathtaking/frightening for advertising as one of those throw-out-the-presses posts would have for journalism.

Clemons believes the Internet is shattering the world of advertising, and that it will fail because it is not trusted, welcome or needed. He views the ad as passe and believes other models will emerge to monetize the Internet --- selling virtual things or selling access, for instance.

But he believes the liberation that comes from using the Internet for other services is applicable to advertising.

"The Internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.  We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of Internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value."

NYU's Jay Rosen recently spoke to science writers in New York about the media revolution --- in particular, the lowering of costs of entry for everyone to possess the tools to communicate with each other --- and Twitter. His 10-minute video is a good insight into his academic work and outlook.

There have been several lengthy reads in the last week on the future of news from Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Dave Winer, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols, and now from the Xark group blog on what news might look like in 2020.

The latter one is probably the most enjoyable of the lot, first because it's a bit of sci-fi and thus feels more escapist than the near-term reality of the other works, but mainly because it carries an optimistic and encouraging thread through it in delivering a framework for change.

The 2020 vision is a long post and my summary of it here will fall short of fairness, but in general it looks at four areas: short-term triage (2009-10), medium-term trends and signals (2009-14), known medium-term options (2009-2014) and what Xark calls the new exotics (2010-2020).

The near-term: newspaper troubles, restraint, end of monopolies, fewer doing the same, breaking up businesses. The trends and signals: open source, semantic foundations, rapid tech evolution, advanced tools, journalistic value in aggregating memory. The possible options: premium sites, Web-only sites, bottom-feeders abound, consolidation, crowdfunding, sponsorships, volunteers, interest-funded journalism. better copyright licencing, merchandising, relevant aggregation. And the exotics: Information scalability, machine readability, datasets, mashups, automated enrichment, predictive intelligence, virtual businesses, value-added news transactions.

As you can see, plenty to review, and of all the pieces I've digested in this March Madness of journalism documents, this one has made me think the most.

In Boing Boing, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media proposes that major media get together a form a consortium to make content available only to subscribers for a proscribed period --- then freely after a certain time, with unlimited archival access.

He chooses a fairly chi-chi list of collaborators:
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
Financial Times
Economist
Atlantic Monthly
Washington Monthly
New Yorker

His plan would essentially bank on two million subscribers at $10 a week (which, if you subscribe to even two of these media, is what you spend now). His post includes a lively q-and-a on the proposal with NYU's Jay Rosen.

There are some methodological holes in it, but a new study suggests some consumers (actually, some bloggers) might be willing to pay for content through a subscription (as opposed to a micropayment) system.

The J.D. Power and Associates survey of bloggers and bulletin boards found about 40 per cent of bloggers already pay, or would pay, for content they use. They prefer the subscription approach because it permits them to tag material for future reference and because they don't see an easy way to develop a per-story fee system.

Media scholar Robert McChesney and online pioneer John Nichols have written what amounts to their manifesto to save American journalism in The Nation.

They take a route lately criticized as dogmatic: That the diminution of newspapers is the diminution of journalism, and that without efforts to rescue the sector the loss of quality and quantity will be such that society will suffer. They do not accept that the loss of newspaper journalism will be offset by the rise of digital media voices.

"Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens," they write.

"Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack."

Their prescriptions are novel: A $200 tax break for Americans to subscribe to a daily newspaper, the elimination of postal rates for some periodicals, low-power FM stations and newspapers for high schools, and much stronger support for public media. It amounts to $20 billion a year for each of the next three years to help the transformation to digital.

There would be strings attached on the amount of advertising and the quantity of news in the paper. Nearly all the content would need to be online free --- same goes for the public broadcasting programs.

It's a provocative addition to the discourse.

Jeff Mignon's media cafe posts on the challenges of keeping news supported by advertising in an era of abundance. He is bullish on the role of databases in the new media order, particularly data collection.

"It is a total paradigm shift. The total nightmare for the media and advertising business."

Get used to it, he writes. There is no longer any kind of corner for media on the advertising market. Scarcity is over.

But there is value in understanding the audience.

"So, if news organizations still want to finance their operations with advertising dollars, they need to ask themselves : 'Are we in the data collection business?' If the answer is no, your chance to survive, with an advertising model, in the medium-to-long term is close to zero."