Journalism is too important to leave to the hands of the market alone. We can’t change the market, but what can we do to change the context?
For starters, we can reduce the risk of experimentation for news organizations looking to engage their communities online by reducing the cost of the tools to free or nearly free. How? Make those tools -- or the basic kernel of those tools -- open-source products to encourage low cost, low risk experimentation by individual news organizations.
To the extent that journalism is becoming a high-tech profession, the strategy should note the ways other industries have pursued innovation through partnerships and collaboration.
For example, high-level technical universities across the globe make significant revenue from technology transfer – licensing technologies developed at university laboratories. A smart j-school or j-school associated institute will take the initiative to get the funding to develop a simple but robust content management system and make it available for free to news organizations (perhaps with some small membership cost to help defray the costs of future development and encourage a sense of shared mission).
Such an initiative need not be very expensive. Drupal, the widely-used open source content management system, was brought to 1.0 levels of development by two students in a dorm room with no formal budget whatsoever. Since then it has emerged as the leading open-source content management system, with a growing and thriving community of developers to enhance and support it.
(Note: The Center for Citizen Media, working with a technology partner, is seeking a foundation grant to pursue precisely this kind of media platform.)
You may know Journalism but you are misinformed about Drupal "as the leading open-source content management system". Speaking as a "technologist" with 40+ years of experience, Ez Publish (see http://ez.no ) from Norway has always been a better product (which is also based on open source software such as PHP5 and MySql).
Most experienced application developers know that the object oriented development environment (including the next generation Ez Components) from Ez are much easier to customize and integrate. Many programmers who have worked on both platforms know this to be true. Some Drupal programmers/opportunists are even planning on creating Support Organizations (search their blogs) to make money off of the fact that Drupal does not scale up, has poor integration of add on components and will require much technical assistance for future users and organizations to keep it running. If you are a Drupal Tech Comapnay that is good for them, but not so good for their dependent customers.
(I do have a stake in all of this as a member of a team of developers of Placeblogs in Kansas Communities.)