To balance the previous, dismal post: a piece at McKinsey Matters by Paul Steiger, head of ProPublica, shows us another way of looking at what's happened. With some pride, he reports that the Los Angeles Times - a paper whose once uniquely large reporting staff is suffering many cuts - published on its front page and in four inside pages an article headed - "Problem nurses stay on job as patients suffer" - a piece of investigative reporting, revealing gross abuse in the Californian health system,by his outfit. ProPublica, created last year with a $10m annual grant from the Sandler Family Foundation, has a staff of fifty and specialises in investigations - which are then made available to its news partners for broadcast or printing.

Conceding that what's going on in US journalism is terrible - Steiger uses a figure of 26,000 journalists laid off between early 2008 and mid 2009 - he lightens the darkness with the observation that "there is plenty of good". That includes:

• getting important news faster
• access to "extraordinarily detailed information across a wide range of subjects
• the ability to mobilise teams of volunteer journalists;
• a "torrent of opinion...some of real value"

Most usefully, I think, he took the argument away from technology and back to what reporting should and can do - the same point made by Bowden. That is:

"The process of finding and communicating what we used to call news may no longer require newspapers—at least not as we have known them, as seven-day-a-week, ink-on-paper compendiums of new information on a broad range of subjects. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill."

Within days, Governer Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed an order firing the majority of the state's nursing board members and replacing them with appointees charged with bearing down on the abuse. So a free press worked as it should.

Cautionary note: ProPublica depends on the Sandler Family Foundation. Good for the Sandler Family: but this again illuminates the problem. The market doesn't do it any longer.