THE DECLINE of the American newspaper has meant the departure of some of our most experienced - and recognizable - journalists.
At The Boston Globe, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara took a buyout in 2007. Just down the road, longtime Providence Journal political reporter Scott MacKay walked away, too.
But increasingly desperate newspapers, buffeted by declining circulation and the continued migration of advertising to the Web, are turning from buyouts to layoffs these days.
And younger, less-familiar staffers at the bottom of the seniority list are feeling the pinch. I should know. The Providence Journal laid off this 30-something reporter just a few months ago.
The cuts have short-term implications, of course. School committee meetings will go uncovered, State House scandals unreported. But they also threaten the long-term health of journalism: With little hope for a resurgence, the generation that might reinvent a dying craft is simply leaving the news business behind.
But there are ways to keep young journalists employed and, more importantly, to preserve the sort of journalism that keeps our democracy afloat.
Some have suggested changes in tax law that would make it easier for philanthropies to buy major news outlets, others favor a National Endowment for Journalism that newspapers could tap to pay for the investigative and international reporting now getting short-shrift.
But we need something bigger. Congress, intent on jump-starting the economy, should set aside $100 million - well under 1 percent of the stimulus approved by the House of Representatives and pending in the Senate - for a national journalism fund.
The cash would seed low-cost, Internet-based news operations in cities large and small - combining vigorous, professional reporting with blogging, video posts, citizen journalism, and aggregation of stories from other sources.
The sites would build on an emerging nonprofit news model that may be our best hope for preserving serious reporting. In California, the scrappy VoiceofSanDiego.org has unearthed all manner of municipal folly. MinnPost in the Twin Cities is doing similar work. The New England Center for Investigative Reporting set up shop at Boston University last month.
Nationally focused outlets like the decades-old Center for Investigative Reporting, in Berkeley, Calif., and the New York-based ProPublica, also specializing on investigative reporting, are making substantial contributions, too.
Of course, these organizations have taken root without a big infusion of federal cash. And we could simply wait on philanthropists to launch similar efforts in Milwaukee and Dubuque, Iowa.
But a scattershot approach, dependent upon the largess of a few well-heeled donors and foundations, is no way to tend to a major pillar of our civil society. We need a big, bold investment in the new journalism. And it is hard to imagine anyone other than the federal government providing loads of start-up cash, particularly in the midst of a recession.
A bailout for journalists - who fall somewhere between lawyers and politicians in the public estimation - could be a tough sell. But we have plenty of precedents for a public investment in words.
The Depression-era Federal Writers Project paid the underemployed to compile oral histories, sketch out ethnographies, and write comprehensive guides to the states. And for more than 40 years, Washington has contributed to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.
Of course, we expect NPR and PBS to do substantial fund-raising on their own. And we should require the news-gathering organizations imagined here to do the same. Indeed, an independent press cannot be entirely beholden to government funding.
If they survive, these sites will not restore the Fourth Estate entirely. VoiceofSanDiego does not have anything approaching the resources of a major metropolitan daily and its federally financed cousins would not either.
Moreover, these local outfits could never make up for the troubling decline in international reporting.
But with newspapers leaving more and more uncovered, we need something to fill in the gaps. And with serious journalism in serious jeopardy, we need a lifeline for a new generation of journalists who would like nothing more than to keep a vital tradition alive.
David Scharfenberg, a guest columnist, is a Boston-based writer. 
