A quick and belated blog post to announce that  Spot Us, a nonprofit that will pioneer "community funded reporting," will be working with the Public Press to help finance local enterprise reporting here in San Francisco.

Spot Us has received a grant from the Knight Foundation to take it from idea-to-production mode ASAP. (read more)

In the broad range of organizations that question the expanding role of marketing in public life, a group called the Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation For Freedom stands among the most ardently opposed to the traditional but uneasy co-existence of advertising and the editorial craft.

It's the same old song, second verse: The old ways of paying for quality journalism are slowly dying and will continue to decline until a new model that works has been created. Though what the best news model looks like is always up for discussion.

American Journalism Review's senior editor, Carl Sessions Stepp, wrote a bulleted list of ways to succeed with the new newspaper. "Maybe it Is Time to Panic," Stepp says.

A few highlights:

In the midst of a year that has seen a truly existential crisis for print journalism, it's instructive to ask ourselves just what kind of paper product newspapers are selling these days. The photo above is what landed on my front stoop last Sunday. Inside the advertising bag was a free sample of what's reputed to be some of the most absorbent pulp money can buy ... plus the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Boston Globe is the latest Top 30 newspaper to use alternative methods to gathering news. For the Sunday Globe it was eight journalism graduate students from Northeastern University for a Page One piece "advocating for senior citizens."

The Public Press will make a prominent showing at the Journalism That Matters conference at the headquarters of Yahoo Inc. at the end of the month.

More than 150 high-tech and media pioneers from a range of industries are meeting for a “concept/design mashup” as part of a nationwide conversation — one aimed at making media reform tangible by creating new products and services that support the core social missions of journalism.

Media reformers across the country have long complained that the current print media paradigm is in need of an overhaul. The Public Press concept is one effort to make up for inadequacies in the business model that has, until recently, supported robust print journalism. Approaching those new -- and as yet unknown -- business models has become a growing topic for debate. One illuminating sign was the publication late last month of the annual State of the News Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Bit by bit, the Public Press project is getting noticed.

I just got off the air from an hourlong interview with Jonathan Rowe, host of the talk show "America Offline" on KWMR, the community radio station in West Marin County.

Though the Public Press team is looking to construct a local news organization that’s innovative in its business model, production, design, financing, management, technology and distribution, the raison detre of this exercise is to cover stories that traditionally have been ignored in the press. This is the fun part: pushing the boundaries of what professional journalists have considered “news.”

What topics are left by the wayside? They include stories that lack a special appeal to so-called quality readers -- the wealthy elite sought by high-end advertisers. (Your suggestions are more than welcome; please leave some ideas in the “comments” section at the bottom of this post.) Some initial thoughts on what would be important for the rest of us to read more of:

Even as vital Bay Area journalistic institutions seemed to crumble before their eyes, a panel of media reformers at the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, sounded almost optimistic Wednesday night.