Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center
"Before I make my Exit, I will recount over some of the many good Deeds I have done, and how useful I have been, and still may be, provided my Life should be spar'd; or I might hereafter revive again." - The self-aware New-Hampshire Gazette after the Stamp Act in 1765. From an amusing New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore chronicling the radical infancy and many near-deaths of our free press.
At a YouTube panel last month on online news videos, Pulitzer Center director Jon Sawyer was introduced as the head of a non-profit journalism organization.
The New York Times' Ann Derry, another member of the panel, remarked, "I think we're all nonprofit at the moment."
That drew a knowing chuckle from the audience of journalists and the other panel participants, among them representatives from The Washington Post, Fox News and CNN. It's a familiar sentiment by now, exemplified by the successive autopsies on and remedies for the industry's gloomy fate. The question of course is what's next?