Top-notch Michigan journalists are hard at work right now on numerous special reports on topics ranging from governmental reform to education to economic diversification. We'll start to publish those reports within the next several weeks as we continue to grow the depth and reach of the Fresh Thoughts For Michigan's Transformation newsletter.

If you're reading this via email, you're one of 5,400 engaged citizens and community leaders across Michigan who get Fresh Thoughts in their in-boxes each week. The distribution has more than doubled in the past year and is on pace to do the same in 2009.

This newsletter is one of many new efforts in journalism — both inside and outside of Michigan — as a dwindling number of experienced newspaper journalists fight through a tough economy and seek to cover an increasingly complex world with fewer and fewer resources.

Consider, for example, a new, foundation-funded effort at citizen-led journalism in Grand Rapids:

"Once established, the four news bureaus — to be created within neighborhood gathering places — will give citizen reporters the tools to gather, write and report on local news and events," according to the Council of Michigan Foundations.

Likewise, big players in philanthropy are beginning to talk about nonprofit news as a key strategy for preserving a vigorous Fourth Estate. Consider a recent guest column in the New York Times:

"Though the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down… By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively."

Could this approach work in Michigan?