I agree with Dean Starkman that “the story is the thing,” and as he does, also believe that journalistic institutions are necessary only insofar as they produce good public-interest journalism.

But the thing about the necessity of insitutions is that they’re really not necessary anymore in a wide and growing swath of the information industry. I fail to see why journalists couldn’t be sharing the cost of office space, back-office services like invoicing and billing, and front-office services like marketing. A friend of mine pointed out to me, when I explained this to her not too long ago, that I seemed to be describing a newspaper. I wasn’t: I was, and am, chewing on the idea of a news collective co-operative, sort of like the AP if its members were other journalists and not newspapers.

This is all just keeping me occupied as I stare at my navel and wonder why I decided a bachelor’s in journalism was a good idea to get in 2007, as newspapers approached their nadir. But I’m curious if I’m the only one who thinks that a cooperative of this type could accomplish what Starkman identifies here:

But all of this misses the point; the talk here is all about process and structure. I’m talking about great stories. As I said in the piece, I care about institutions only to the extent that they can produce them. If FON Theory or social production can do it, I will be first in line at the next 140 Characters Conference. In fact, I may go anyway. Sam McClure (also dead, yet relevant) was right when he kept repeating, “The story is the thing.” It is the thing. It’s the main thing journalism does, isn’t it? Public-interest journalism is, for me anyway, its core, around which the rest of it is organized. It’s the rationale for all of it—the printing presses, the trucks, the ad departments, the journalism schools, etc. It doesn’t matter that McClure’s basically flamed out two years after Tarbell’s Standard Oil series. What matters is the kind of stories it pioneered are still being produced to this day, almost entirely, and probably not coincidentally, within institutional settings.