David Cohn set the December 2008 Carnival of Journalism an awkward task: predict something optimistic about 2009, at a point when newsroom cuts, falling revenues and a financial crisis made pessimism the easier register.
The prediction offered here was that trouble at the large news brands opened space for guerilla journalism start-ups. There was already a marker for it — four of the more prominent online community news services had just taken money from the Knight Foundation to strengthen their hometown reporting. The second part of the argument came from the layoffs themselves. Cutting newsrooms is bad news, but it also releases trained reporters who may prefer the freedom of a small, low-cost operation based in and reporting on one community.
The prediction was that the following twelve months would bring more of these, experimenting with business models built around public service rather than profit. Behind it sat an observation about who does the work: few people enter the profession for the pay, so a realignment of journalism from for-profit business towards public good would not be asking journalists for a sacrifice they had not already made.