Gannett wants an Oshkosh Community News Network

Last week Gannett announced its vision for the future of news and newspapers.

It sounds an awful lot like what we have been trying to do here at Oshkosh News for the last two years, namely to harness digital tools and the "wisdom of crowds" to cover the news.

All I can say is that it sounds good on paper, but the execution is likely to be a challenge.

One problem for traditionally trained journalists is that this approachs means ceding a lot of control to the "great unwashed."

But always, always, always the real problem is economics. Unless you are Google, the Internet is not a place where news companies can expect to earn the kinds of returns that have been available in print (or on the airwaves).

Gannett can hope to rely on content from citizens, but that material is likely to arrive irregularly and be of uneven quality. (One Gannett paper had to shut down its version of the Oshconversation because the commenting got so far out of hand.)

My prediction is that eventually news organizations will have to find some way to provide financial incentives to contributors as a way of creating a manageable flow of information. Those incentives won't necessarily be in the way of direct payments, but there will have to be tangible rewards.

There is going to have to be a major change in thinking about how to do journalism, both among full-time working journalists and certainly among those of us who are supposed to be training the next generation of journalists.