Journalism's Crisis Is Public Media's Opportunity

[Commentary] You know about the crisis: Tens of thousands of journalists losing their jobs. Local outlets shuttered or reduced to a shell. A "perfect storm" created when the rise of the Internet and the end of local advertising monopolies collided with the economic downturn.

Of course, the media's most serious wounds have been self-inflicted. While regulators rubber-stamped one mega-merger after another, the big media companies took on massive amounts of debt. Now they're drowning in it, and they're taking newsrooms down with them. Wherever you point the blame, we face the same daunting reality: There is no longer enough private capital -- in the form of advertising, subscriptions, philanthropy and other sources -- to support the depth and breadth of quality local, national and international news reporting our communities need to participate in a 21st century democracy. And there's the opportunity: This is the moment to re-imagine our old public broadcasting system and rebuild it as a new public media network committed to education, to community service and, most importantly, to local newsgathering.

Local news reporting should become one of public media's top priorities, and we should redeploy and redouble our resources accordingly. We need public media to put professional reporters, fact checkers and editors on the beat to keep a watchful eye on the powerful and to reliably examine the vital issues that most Americans can't follow closely on their own.

Oh, yes -- we also need to figure out how to pay for it.