Change is not something that most people welcome, and journalists, being particularly cranky by nature, are more resistant than most. As the internet up-ends the business model of the media industry in general and big-city newspapers in particular, the reaction of many journalists has been to wring their hands about the alleged negative societal impact of a diminished serious-news business, and look for ways to maintain the traditional way of doing things.

Last week I participated in a conference at the University of California at Berkeley on the subject of journalism and news coverage in the Golden State. The premise was that the financial decline of institutions such as the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News, and the rise of untrustworthy blogs, amounted to a crisis in journalism that had to be addressed. The proposed solutions mostly involved money from foundations and philanthropists, and even the government stepping in to finance worthy reporting and editing.

Personally, I found the conversation a little odd. As I pointed out during my panel, we were sitting in the heartland of innovation, just a few miles from where the very industry-changing technologies at issue had been invented, and yet there was hardly any talk about the journalistic opportunities presented by new technologies, or about how entrepreneurship might fit into the equation.

True, no new business model for journalism has appeared that looks as lucrative as the monopoly newspaper model of the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, but people tend to forget that that period itself was an anomaly. Yes, the reporting and editing staffs of many newspapers – not to mention TV and radio stations – are much smaller than they were even a few years ago. But does that mean there are fewer talented journalists, or less journalism? I don't think so.

New business models can take time to develop, but I'm convinced they're out there. For me the most inspiring thing at the Berkeley conference was a presentation from David Beers, who grew up in Silicon Valley and now lives in Vancouver. He's started an online publication called The Tyee, serving British Colombia. Like my company, NewWest.Net, The Tyee is a for-profit business, backed by investors who believe in the journalistic mission and are willing to be patient. And it is publishing some great journalism.

David Talbot and Joan Walsh, respectively the founder and current editor of the pioneering online magazine Salon.com, were also on hand for the conference – a reminder that Salon and its fellow online magazine pioneer, Slate, continue to publish outstanding journalism. New publications are popping up all the time.

On the same trip I had the chance to catch up with my old compatriot John Battelle, whose company, Federated Media, sells advertising and provides other services for a network of independent online publishers. Not all of these sites have much to do with journalism, but some of them do – and Federated Media is doing extremely well. If you can create something that a large number of people want to read, or that can attract a small but highly loyal community, the online advertising dollars are there to support it.

The rub, of course, is that the type of things that lots of people want to read are often not the type of things that make a positive contribution to democracy and civic discourse. This doesn't have much to do with the internet, but it's convenient to co-mingle these issues. The ease of publishing on the web means that there's that much more porn and celebrity gossip and uninformed commentary ‘polluting’ the media environment, as one speaker put it. It's all that much harder to get people to pay attention to what serious journalists think is important.

To my mind, though, this is precisely the challenge. How do you do journalism about real issues that's both compelling for readers and affordable for publishers? Now that technology has broken the distribution stranglehold that's always been at the core of newspaper and television profits, there should over time be lots of interesting answers to that question. We're witnessing not the end of journalism, but its re-invention, and I find that to be quite exciting.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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