This week on Free Press' radio show Media Minutes, Len Downie and Michael Schudson discuss their new report, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." They continue their conversation in a Media Minutes Extra segment. You can listen to the audio or read the transcript below:

The Reconstruction of American Journalism, a new report from the Columbia School of Journalism, surveys a wide swath of the journalism landscape and suggests a path forward in this new era of digital news.

The authors or the study are Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, which won 25 Pulitzer Prizes under his watch, and Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia.

In the course of researching the paper, Schudson was heartened by the innovative projects at places like Pro Publica, MinnPost.com and VoiceofSanDiego.org.

Michael Schudson: As I paid closer attention to the startups and began talking to people, this is real journalism – it’s not just a couple of guys in their pajamas. They’re serious journalists, they’re doing significant accountability journalism, they’re winning national prizes, they’re utterly dedicated, they’re looking themselves for new business models and alternate sources of funding, and they are unbelievable enthusiastic about what they’re doing. It’s like they have a mission like nobody’s business – it’s really remarkable.

And because of the new media, because you can put up your Web site, you don’t need to buy a printing press or delivery truck or all the other significant startup costs for newspapers or television stations and so on, this can grow.

Schudson and Downie predict that newspapers will survive this digital transformation but with diminished capacity and influence. They caution that it’s unlikely many news organizations will be supported primarily by existing online revenue and recommend a mixture of for-profit and nonprofit models for future sustainability.

Their recommendations that are sparking the greatest public debate involve policy changes to expand public media and help news organizations gain new sources of revenue. (Listen to Downie and Schudson discuss their ideas about government involvement in journalism on this week’s Media Minutes.)

One of their recommendations is to reorient public radio and television to provide significant local news reporting. Although Downie and Schudson would like to see increased funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they argue that it’s not just a question of more money but how existing funding is spent. Downie explains:

Len Downie: A lot of the resources that are now currently available to public radio and television – I realize it’s tight – nevertheless are going to internal operations, to buildings, to facilities, to signal maintenance that may be beyond what is absolutely necessary, and that some of that money can be reoriented towards local news coverage, if that’s what people really want to do. There’s a low interest in local news coverage at many stations around the country, because they don’t identify that as a top fundraising draw, as opposed to National Public Radio for national programming and other kinds of national programming that is not news. That’s particularly the case, I believe, with public television stations, where, if you watch fundraising, you’ll see that news doesn’t really play a part in it, and most of whom do no local news coverage at all.

On the other hand, one of the reasons that we think this is possible is that there are notable exceptions: Minnesota Public Radio, Oregon Public Radio, Northern California Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, WNYC in New York, whatever the call letters are in Boston. There are a number of stations around the country that are interested in doing local news, and somehow they’ve been able to organize their resources in a way that puts substantial resources into local news. They raise money for local news coverage. And I’ve talked with some of the people that run those operations, and they say other stations can do what they do, if only they really want to do it.

There are also more signals in the country than are necessary in certain metropolitan areas like Los Angeles. There are still more public radio signals than there need to be, and they could be rationalized. And the CBP is trying to encourage that kind of rationalization, which again also would save money on overhead.

Blending nonprofit and for-profit journalism and making public policy to create opportunities for sustainable journalistic models is not a new concept, Downie insists. Collaborations are in process and have been very successful.

Len Downie: The growth of nonprofits and university-funded journalism and so on has been going on. And even the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, for example, have all published numerous articles, either from or in collaboration with Pro Publica already, for example. So the nonprofit sector is not unknown to us.

Everybody’s staff decreases, but their ambitions remain large. We’re working with other people to give our readers what we think our readers need in a variety of ways. So it’s not antithetical, it’s not foreign; it’s not different from the mission of the newspaper to be mixing the kind of journalism in terms of how they’re funded. The paper itself, the report itself discusses for-profit journalism at great length, commercial journalism at great length, and looks at all the ways in which experiments are going on to make up for lost advertising revenue, which we have views on, and other kinds of experiments and collaboration – which we approve of and strongly urge that it continue – collaboration among newspapers and collaboration with commercial media with nonprofit media, and so on. So, it’s not an either-or situation.

We may not have a full grasp of what is happening to news reporting, but Schudson says this era of reorganization is an opportunity to rethink the entire concept of what we have been calling journalism.

Michael Schudson: Journalists, citizens, news organizations, non-news organizations – I find it quite interesting to think about the amount of reporting and reporting-like activities that go on in government itself, in NGOs, in universities, in a variety of institutions – information that frequently winds up in the newspapers, but is beginning to get there, I think, more easily, more readily, as people in the news media and out are monitoring one another, are reading the blogs, so that the lateral spread of information from friend to friend and link to link – all of this is really changing what the process of news work is like.

It’s not just enclosed news organization silos surveying the world beyond them. They’re both more connected and more interactive with non-news organizations and individuals than ever before. And stories, they move across individuals and organizations and systems much more quickly, much more effectively than ever before.

We don’t yet have a full conceptual grasp about this. But I think it requires, for the academic and the media theorists and ultimately – but that may be down the road a bit – for the journalist, some rethinking of what it is that you want to call journalism, and how this whole informational world is organized.

There has not been a reorganization of the world of news like this in hundreds of years. So there is no better time to be thinking about and trying to think through journalism.

Read "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."