Ideas

"The Woodward-Bernstein myth, as powerful as it was to a previous generation, is spent," publishing expert and Bay Area resident Ken Doctor writes on his blog, Content Bridges. "The best evidence of that may be today's rehashing of the Post/Times Watergate saga; how yesterday to anyone born in the last 35 years."

"We need a new myth," he continues. "We need tales of spirited multimedia reporters bringing back the news from Iraq and Indianapolis."

The comments were made in a post titled "It's Time for a News Corps." In it, Doctor, a former veep of content services, strategy, and editorial for Knight Ridder Digital and now a news analyst for Outsell, a market analytics firm, argues that the news business should set up a journalism equivalent of Teach for America or the Peace Corps: Hire an army of young folks at baseline salaries to help reinvent the news business.

His idea is short on specifics. He envisions a first class of about 1,000, paid around $35,000, comparable to what Teach for America offers. Who would pay for it and how it would be organized he doesn't say. But no matter. It's an interesting idea.

"Journalism's never needed more reinvention, more passion, more youth," he writes.

"We need to attract some of the most energetic and innovative minds to this reinvention," he continues later. "We'd learn things about the craft of journalism that we've only conjectured about."

Doctor said his idea was inspired by a recent New York Times article about the organic farm internship movement: If young people are willing to shovel manure before dawn in the interest of making a difference in the world, why wouldn't they sign up to help save journalism?

(And yes, feel free to insert obligatory joke about shoveling manure after dawn here.)