I sit on the boards of two Journalism schools and attended the top Masters program just before the journalism crash of 2009. I am on these boards mostly because both schools think that some guy in Silicon Valley has insight into what journalism students should be doing. Its not true.

The problem was that massive disruption of print media really came to a head due to the great recession, when low media buys plus a real uptick of traction from ad networks put a final nail in a lot of print journalists careers.

Looking back its easy to think if they were more tech savvy they could have somehow survived -- but thats just not the case. Tech and journalism are more closely related than ever, and specifically scripted languages and knowledge of markup (CSS and JS Libraries) can improve the final product's production quality, but journalists are not programmers no should they be. Its similar to saying journalists should know how to roll their own print presses in the 50s -- its not their job.

The problem lies more in the fact that we simply can't fund journalists to do their job anymore. We charge them with both doing investigative reporting, staying neutral and coming up with a sustainable business model for it -- and you know what? Its just too much to ask. Local news stations are slowly dying out, local newspapers are already mostly thinned out and upstarts like Patch (flawed as it was) were not able to fund real journalistic work.

After a few years going back and forth on this I have come to believe that a BBC like model in the US would do the nation great deal of good. Funding journalists to do their job and keep up the good work without pressuring them to make compromises is essentially to keeping voters informed.

I hope we can get over our mindset that all things need to be privatized at some point in the near future and begin funding PBS, NPR, and local news to keep doing what they are doing.