It is a curious thing, in an era of revolutionary change in the media landscape, that journalists and editors have gained so little.

The Internet has been a boon for citizen media. It's like Neal Postman's pre-telegraph America, the original media convergence of spoken word and written text. The Lyceums and Chautauquas, the newspapers and pamphleteers -- they've come full circle, virtually.

Corporations are also gaining ground. Rocked by layoffs, consolidation and cutbacks, they are nonetheless monetizing online media, and rather expediently.

Journalists and editors, however -- the ones doing the actual work of producing and publishing news -- have neither the editorial and topical freedom of the blogger, nor the economic opportunity of the corporations.

They are in fact the ones getting laid off, consolidated and cut back, bound to the priorities of a commercial sector that is committed to profit at the expense of public service.

Speaking in September 2008 at the Knight Foundation's Silicon Valley forum on community information needs, Mike McGuire, a research VP at Gartner, asked: If content really is king, why are content producers getting the short end of the stick? Why not start cutting sales staff at failing media outlets instead of reporters and editors?

In fact, cutting ad revenue altogether would have an additional, significant benefit directly related to journalism's situation: It would relieve the newsroom of outside economic pressures that impede the practice of journalism in the public interest.

This was precisely what motivated earlier rounds of public-media investment in the United States, producing such institutions as All Things Considered and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Yet for all their merits, these programs -- highly centralized, capital intensive, grounded in Wall Street and Washington, D.C. -- are not replicable, particularly not locally and regionally, where the need is so acute.

Independent Arts & Media supports the development of new, commercial-free news and journalism programs that use a broad variety of emerging and traditional platforms, and that are more effectively connected to, supportive of and supported by diverse and underserved communities.

Our goal in this regard is to deepen the resources and independence of the journalist amd the documentarian -- to unhook them from the commercial business model, and give them new autonomy to cover underserved communities and important but overlooked news.