Good question. Still, it begs having a few points to be made.

Non-profit news is not like not-for profit disability advocacy, behavioral health counseling or the United States Postal Service. The first two named must hit up organizations for grants and funds with the only funding from the general public being collection of fees. CILs don't tend to have fees and the one I volunteered for seemed to be more effective with a small volunteer staff than the entire health clinic I referred to that seems to me to always be in meetings and nobody avaiable much.

The Postal Service was President Nixon's private experiment to send the mail service slowly into hell and he is not here to take guff. It's a mad thing as postal workers as I know them are heroes of service and models of integrity and spirit (shooters excluded). I never knew twice-a-day delivery and frankly the thought of getting twice as many AOL secret word drink coasters always bothered me...

None of those other outfits can do what public radio and news networks can do--combine from a number of services around the world. Co-operative collaboration between organizations, each with different funders and public pledgers or taxes from everyone with the syndication proceeds and distribution rights are what can make the system more stable and easy to present for any given broadcaster.

Public radio has been doing this for years upon years. Other types of nonprofit organizations have come upon the status out of some notion of cost control or reduction in a state budget and yet may be failing to sustain a workable level of funding and cutting to the point of stagnancy.

Public news providers are in the catbird seat in my opinion. As rough as it might get there are plenty of others to pool with and even at the cost of obtaining the clearances it has to be a solid value to me.

As to filling the local news void? In markets where the broadcaster or their licensee draw large support or perhaps can produce syndicated broad programming types for other stations (OPB is a decent example of this if not much of a news provider) MAYBE. Using the Oregon example we see commercial stations that not only produce a lot of news programming but contribute heavily to a regional news network such as NorthWest Cable News. I should point out that at least in Boise and I suspect chainwide NWCN is on a subchannel of at the least KTVB. This might make more sense than fighting to keep it on cable TV; it's certainly a great idea.

If the future of local news seems threatened, creating a regional network and placing it on a DTV subchannel sounds very helpful to local stations.

Recently a lot of violent actions (police murdered and other tragedies) have no doubt brought a great deal of attention to NWCN and having it on local DTV

I'm suggesting partnerships can benefit both parties. The local news shouldn't get this stuff for free. At the moment, it's often in the best interest of the NPO to get the exposure. But you're right - there needs to be a sustainable business model.

Wait...are you suggesting that NPOs use their own dollars to produce and provide content/news stories for local news? If so, that seems really far fetched. Donation dollars are down all around the non profit sector. That means many NPOs are going to lower their annual budgets, which means jobs will be cut along with budgets. Why would a struggling NPO spend their own money to create content on a local TV station when that money can be stretched much further on the Web which is national if not international? Don't get me wrong, the stories that NPOs have to tell are fascinating and compelling and they should get as much coverage as they can. But to spend money to do seems a little out of line.