Typepad has offered to ride to the rescue of journalists losing their gigs by offering them a deal on blogging, including participation in an ad network, but will the marketplace support a small army of journalistic blogs? Some say no, especially in the current advertising trough period.

From PBS's Mediashift, a piece by Simon Owens:

It's related to this post from earlier this week: Signs of the times - The Typepad bailout program for journos

Of course, the underlying business model Six Apart is touting, online advertising, could well get hit hard during the recession. In fact, Six Apart itself announced recently it would lay off close to 10% of its workforce. In a recent widely-circulated post, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton argued that the decline in online ads would be even more severe than analysts expected. And sure enough, within days of that prediction, Denton announced that he would be cutting his own staff and folding some blogs.

Given these grim warnings, would it be realistic to think that journalists-turned-bloggers will be able to sustain themselves?

"For Nick in particular, I've been friends with him for years, there's nothing I wouldn't say to his face, but I think he's always made a very good business of being the most doom-and-gloom person in the room," Dash said. "And also he ends up being right a lot of time; if you're consistently negative then half the time you end up being right. But if what he's saying is true, I think it's better for writers if they get a bigger cut for what they're doing ... And secondly, we're not trying to be a publisher, and though I think Nick is a successful publisher, there's still a middle man with Gawker just like Conde Nast or any other publisher. I think that model is inherently a little harder to sustain. The web is very efficient at routing around middlemen."

All advertising is going to get hit hard during the looming recession (which we should all hope doesn't escalate into a depression). MSM companies in Canada are already feeling the strain.

Dash's glass-half-full argument does have some merit. One of the major disruptive effects of the Internet has been disintermediation.

But as one commenter noted, there is the small question of whether a journalist can build a large enough audience to make for an economically sustainable operation based solely on advertising.

If you already have a brand name, possibly. If you're an anonymous worker bee in the vast media hive, the likelihood drops.

The other question is whether people want sites dedicated to journalism. Most people read for entertainment value or self-interest, not to make themselves better citizens in a self-governing democratic society.

That constrains the audience of a capital-J journalism site.

With a traditional news site, your "nutritious" news is bundled with your "junk food" news. Come for the Paris Hilton and horoscope, stay for the economic analysis of APEC's plans for its members to work their way out of the current financial crisis.

The more hard-hitting and "investigative" a specific report, the longer it takes to produce. A major piece of investigative journalism can consume weeks or months. Yet blogs work best with a steady stream of small updates.

Newspapers made their once-considerable money by also producing special sections that catered to advertisers as much as readers, most notably autos and real estate.

Who will pay a premium to have their ad next to a story about a used-car or real estate scam, for example?

All that being said, it appears some journalistic websites are springing up in the U.S. and having some journalistic succes. See this post from Nov. 18: Low-cost investigative websites springing up in the U.S.

There's also this concept: Crowdsourcing.

Mediashift's Mark Glaser had a Nov. 13 article entitled Can crowdsourcing help fund the journalism business?

Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.

Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.

[Full Disclosure: I am on the advisory board to RepJ and, like Spot.us, have also received a grant from the Knight Foundation.]

Artists have always had their patrons. Perhaps successful independent journalists will have swarms of them, not paying a subscription, but funding particular journalistic endeavours.

I don't know what will eventually prove to be the workable model.

What I do know is that most newspaper newsrooms began shrinking even before the disruptive effects of the Internet and the growing economic crisis that will leave Canada in a technical recession.

To my mind, what is clear is that traditional newsroom jobs likely won't be coming back.