I had provided a link to David Carr’s latest Media Equation column, “The Fall and Rise of Media,” in which he wrote:

Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers…

Once inside that velvet rope, they would find the escalator that would take them through the various tiers of the business and eventually, they would be the ones deciding who would be allowed to come in.

As even casual readers of media news know, those assumptions now sound precious, preposterous even. Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing.

Carr recites a now-familiar litany of media industry woes: fewer pages, lower revenues, a seemingly endless trail of buyouts and layoffs, and traditional skill sets that are no longer in demand at a price most would equate with earning a living. And yet, Carr concludes on a note that I read as hopeful:

Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent. For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down…

Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

Carr’s column unleashed a torrent of thoughtful responses from third-semester students just days away from graduation. Some were encouraged, like the young woman who said, “Thanks! A good read and break from all the obits being written about media,” and another who wrote, “That was a bright side, nice for a change. Someone still believes in us.”

A third said:

It does depress me a bit. I don’t know what’s out there for me and I’m 10-15 years older than most. But I’ve also been around long enough to have seen and heard other reports that “the sky is falling.” So…I do believe that there’s still hope.

Another student, also older than most of her classmates, had this perspective:

The people who chose to ignore the teetering and heedlessly dig deeper screwed us all by not using their vantage point to scope out firmer ground. So now as the legions of burgeoning j-students slouch into being, we don’t get the secure escalator, sure, but maybe that’s a blessing. Maybe what we needed all along was to stay grounded.

Yet another wrote, “Thanks for this. I guess there is some hope,” but later that day, sent further thoughts:

Yes, the landscape is ripe for innovation, independence and freelancing, but how are we making money? Yes, I can start a blog, maybe get a few Google ads, but I don’t have the luxury of waiting for the money to come with the reality of rent, bills and student loans that are in the now. So I’m optimistic yes, but believe me, it’s hard.

Similarly, one of the young men about to graduate, and frustrated by the hunt for a “traditional” media job, voiced a concern of those for whom becoming an entrepreneur feels more like a burden than an opportunity:

I know my limitations. While some young people can easily turn their ideas into small companies, we don’t all have the talent to create a new app or software that would change the media landscape. I still consider some of the traditional skills — curiosity, skepticism — to be vital to journalism.

Finally, there was this:

I love Carr’s take on this, but it makes me really tired, to be honest. It is hard enough to think about writing good stories and being a good journalist, let alone having to also figure out how best to package and sell it at the same time. I feel a lot of pressure, as traditional models are shattered, to become not only a good journalist, but a good entrepreneur. And I don’t particularly care to be one of those latter animals.

I think that in this urgent conversation, we forget … [that] a writer is not a photographer is not a copy editor is not an editor is not an ad salesman. In “traditional’ journalism,” those things hung in a kind of balance. Maybe imperfectly, but functionally.

That model is going the way of the dodo. That’s fine, we can’t change that. We have to come up with something new. But, as graduating student journalists, we are being asked, expected, required to have as many specialized skills as possible in order to have a hope of making a living in this field. Sure, there are some multi-talented, bottomless-energy folks who are able to do this. But not everyone can. And not everyone wants to.

Still, this same young woman concludes:

I’m as excited as Carr that enterprising people who love technology and information are able to create new avenues for delivering stories. And really, as curmudgeonly as all the above may sound, I don’t think that “traditional” media does it perfectly. We’re all just fumbling through as we always have. I just hope that in the scramble to make a dime in this business, we don’t forget why we’re doing it and who we’re serving.

So, DNJ readers, take a look at Carr’s piece; do you find it depressing? Hopeful? Somewhere in between, or something entirely else?

While the idea of getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project is not new — charities do it, political campaigns do it — some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs, as Mashable recently observed, are starting to apply the same crowdfunding concept to the news.

One of them is David Cohn at Spot.Us, a Bay Area-based project that’s using crowdfunding to support investigative journalism. Members of the public provide tips and suggestions for stories; an interested journalist crafts a pitch; the pitch is then presented back to the public for funding. Once enough money is raised and the story is completed, it is offered or sold for publication. (Read more about how Spot.Us works here, see the stories it has reported here, and watch Cohn explain his mission here.)

Spot.Us crowdfunded reporting made its way recently into the pages of the New York Times. The story,  “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash,” by Lindsay Hoshaw, described a a plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. It included a photo slideshow, and a note at the end that “travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us.”

As the first such high-profile partnership of its kind, the article has garnered a lot of attention among new-media observers. Below are links to some of the discussion that ensued online.

Even before it was clear that Hoshaw and Spot.Us would raise the money necessary to report the story, the Times’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote about the newspaper’s experimental relationship with Spot.Us in a column called “One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks.”

“To some, this is exploitation — the mighty New York Times forcing a struggling journalist to beg with a virtual tin cup,” Hoyt wrote.

But Hoshaw does not think so. To her, it is an opportunity she cannot pass up — a story she has long dreamed of, and a chance for a byline in The Times. To David Cohn, the founder of the nonprofit Spot.Us, it is a way for the public to commission journalism that it wants. For The Times, it is another step into a new world unthinkable even a few years ago.

The day Hoshaw’s story was published, Cohn, in his blog, called it “a great case study for Spot.Us, arguably the best of the 40+ projects we’ve undertaken in the past year,” and praised the Times for acting “as if they were a lean and mean startup,” in contrast to the frustrating experiences he’d had with other news organizations.

But over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Megan Garber trashed the Times’s garbage patch story, saying it failed to deliver the “human connection” promised in the pitch, had too much of a “could-be-done-from anywhere” type of reporting rather than the first-hand sense of being out at sea, and “could have been much, much better.” Garber wrote that she wished the Times article had more closely resembled the “good stuff” that appeared in Hoshaw’s personal blog of real-time reports, filed during the time she spent in the Pacific researching the story.

Here’s Lindsay Hoshaw’s response to CJR, in which she acknowledged that her blogging-at-sea had indeed given readers a richer story. “I wrote what I believed the Times wanted,” she said, “though they never specified the type of article they expected.”

Bill Mitchell of Poynter also analyzed the Spot.Us/New York Times experiment, as did Mashable.

And it was Scott Rosenberg who pointed out that “The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — [Hoshaw's] blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.Us model.”

All told, it was a spirited discussion about an experiment in what could be one of the ways forward for journalism.