Mark Glaser's MediaShift site has produced a very intuitively strong and instructive look at alternative business models emerging for newspapers in the digital age --- arguably the cutting edge of the most significant media issues today.

His options: blog networks, classified networks, crowdfunding, customized papers, hyperlocal ads, local portals, multimedia ads, niche sites, non-profits and paid content. All are explored in the posting.

It's a useful guide to some of the decisions ahead. As Glaser puts it, the newspaper of the future will have to depend on a variety of revenue streams to pay for its work.

The American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project has been a resolute, prescriptive, helpful addition to the information the industry has long craved to help steer its course. Now one of its architects is suggesting newspapers need to help fasten businesses to customers through a strong improvement in local search capabilities online, serving effectively as brokers for such services as AdWords and Facebook.
This is not a large digression from the existing role of providing the advertising environment to find the select customer base. But it suggests newspapers need to bring forward better search engines to capitalize on an opening on the local markets and need to think about being connectors in new ways.

That anyone would have been suggesting a government bailout for journalism would have been unsuggestable only a year or two ago. But that's the argument, no tongue in cheek, from David Sasaki in the Mediashift Idea Lab section of PBS.org. Tim Windsor wrestles this concept to the ground, but it likely isn't the last of it.