Plenty of ideas abound on rescuing ailing newspapers. Lately we've seen debate on the non-profit model and the micropayment model. Now comes the community-owned model.

As in: Green Bay Packers, the NFL team owned and operated by its community. The proposal in this post emanates from concerns the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is nearing collapse. Its union is exploring the idea of community members essentially owning shares of the ongoing operation.

Now, a few things to bear in mind in reading the post here: The Packers are part of a league that performs many of the most important functions for it. The NFL jointly sets payroll caps, negotiates television contracts, and operates many of the front- and back-office functions commonly across franchises so there are no market advantages. The Packers can theoretically win as much as a big-market team.  I'm not sure the community ownership is the saving grace as much as the collective league and player agreement in controlling costs and ensuring competitiveness.

But, a concept worth exploring.

There are a number of ways to interpret the British House of Lords report on media ownership:
1. It's not wise to relax ownership restrictions because there are more media sources.
2. It's not wise to relax ownership restrictions because more media does not equal better media sources.
3. It's not wise to relax ownership restrictions because more media does not mean more investment in journalism.
Any way you interpret it, the report found that the growth of news sites isn't necessarily contributing to proper investment in news gathering. The pool is wider, but not particularly deeper. Of particular concern are investments in investigative work. Much of the new sites are repackages of other content, not generation of original material.
While proprietors argued that the proliferation of news sources made it possible to relax restrictions, the report says more is not necessarily better, and relaxing the situation might only make it worse.