The Scent of PRAVDA: for-Profit News Morph to non-Profit

"The Peoria Plan for saving local dailies"  (referral tip from Peoria Pundit) is nothing more than a tax payer subsidized, job bank for journalism school graduates, benevolently named an L3C "low profit" community-owned operation.

The first red flag is that the "community coalition" as described by the Newspaper Guild official Jennifer Towery (read:  Counterpart to lcoal Ron Gettlefinger (UAW head))is the group that "is pushing legislation".   What the heck does it take to qualify as a "community coalition" these days?  I'd think if you were really a local "community coalition" and had a member of the local newspaper guild, there would have been an article about you, first appearing in your local Peoria newspapers media, rather than in a blog about a city 2000 miles away.

What should bother you about this "community coalition" is a most basic political example of "pay to play", "pay to print" or  "...will you scratch mine so I can stay in business and scratch yours..."

Peoria, he noted in a press release, has put together support for L3C legislation that includes four state legislators, local businesses, and a handful of bank presidents. “Their goal,” Licata says, “is to get their paper back on track."  

The notion of "Support",mentioned with "pushing legislation" can only mean "support of the tax payer" with the degree of burden to be determined by the "elites" known only as four state legislators, local businesses and handful of bank presidents.    Let's short cut to the endgame, a circle jerk, already in place between the chamber of commerce, publicly financed bureaucrats and public unions in the school district and municipal administrative offices.   Freedom of the press, from government is an antiquated concept when the ink on the rollers is financed via a "public-private partnership".

If the commodity were to be defined as "a broad and diverse collection of accurate and timely information regarding the most pressing issues", expect quality to decline as those with the journalism degrees pander to the "mother's of their milk" and plate the presses with the pleas of an "impoverished bureaucracy that exists only to noblely serve the needs of the least of the community", and fail to even bother with burying beneath the fold, so much as a single ledger of the accurate cost of this "public-private venture".

This country and every freedom it has, was founded upon and protected, in no small part by the  succession of Benjamin Franklins, working alone in the evening, typesetting the news of the day on a press, paper and with ink that was solely their own, not owned by or beholden to some incestuous cabal of local officials, business people and not-for-profits.   From this austere begining, cities like Peoria, Illinois developed in the midst of a vibrant public discourse made possible by the existence of a sundry of local pundits, each with their own small broadsheet presses and cadre of supporters from the community that supported their publishing through subscriptions, advertising and submission of news content.

Over time, these small papers were consolidated into a monolith (Peoria Journal Start) has for a long time lacked the diversity of politic, thought and vibrancy of its many origins.   In spite of this circumstance, the vibrancy and democracy of citizen or 1st Amendment speech in the Peoria community has gone back to its journalistic roots.  But this time instead of Ben Franklin setting type by candlelight it is CJ Summers , Bill Dennis and Merle Widmere sitting in their drawers and blogging on a netbook, without the corrupting influence of any dominating political or corporate patron saint, and subjecting themselves personally, and in real time to the individual hisses and boos and collective praise of their growing readership.

Meanwhile the "Heidelbergs on the Hill", sitting there at One Journal Star Plaza , pass on full and timely coverage of issues such as school closings even while they conspire to Quit Claim their 1st Amendment birthright for a pot of comforting porridge courtesy of the  legislators, businesses and bank presidents who are only to happy to never again suffer the affliction of the 1st Amendment from those journalists who would fill themselves with ill gotten porridge.

WWRBW (what would Rick Baker write)