Bollinger, the 19th president of Columbia University

His specious logic rests on the fact that Americans — “ironically,” in a misuse of the word — already consume state-supported news in the form of PBS and NPR here, and the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV abroad and that all is well with that arrangement. It’s near impossible to get past the holding up of an official Chinese news source as an example of a flourishing press, but there’s more if you can control your laughter…

Bollinger points to how BP’s ad budget supports newspapers and has done little to influence coverage as if that matter were an a priori fact, and not worth talking about. And he points to public universities and government-funded research as unproblematic examples of public involvement working well in intellectual pursuits and thus evidence that we should be looking at some sort of American version of the BBC.

It’s a flimsy argument anyway you cut it, but what bothered me in particular is his ignoring the question of how such a rough beast would be fielded. Bollinger doesn’t express precisely what kind of government-funded news operation would take shape, but his hints are troubling. It feels like we’d end up with some sort of sprawling redux of the sprawling operations that are now having so many problems precisely because of their sprawl. The assumption seems to be that if tax dollars were to pay for journalism, that what they’d buy is yet another massive, inefficient operation that tries to do everything but does nothing well.

Bollinger points to the fact that there are “only a few dozen full-time correspondents” covering China these days. Ok, let’s assume that’s too few. How many do you need? And how should they be covering China: sitting in a Beijing press club or living in the rural provinces? More importantly, is the problem more one of quality or quantity? Is it a people problem or is it a tech problem? Do we need more generalist types or specialists who may not be “full-time” correspondents but business people or human-right practicioners or urban planners or environmental experts who can write with greater depth and urgency about the most important issues facing the country. Maybe the money spent on Columbia graduates would actually be better spent on a technology platform that would allow those people in rural area that are so hard to cover to speak for themselves.

It’s probably not fair to pick on Bollinger for an example that might have been off the top of his head, but the point is this: The problem in journalism today is not simply or necessarily that there’s not enough journalists running around. There’s also a fundamental confusion about what news is and what its role in our society and culture should be.

These are questions that shouldn’t be sorted out by the government. Instead, it should be up to journalists and news consumers to work it out for themselves. That means listening to your audience, creating cost-effective staffs and innovating until the content and its delivery make sense.

In my mind, the form can’t be separated from the funding source.

I used to think it was just me who had to dig for days to turn up a single good candidate. Maybe, I just didn’t know where to look. Maybe, as editor of Ad Age, or editor-in-chief of Breaking Media, I just wasn’t offering sexy enough jobs, after all the jobs I was looking to fill definitely required some business reporting skills. But over the last couple of years I’ve had the discussion with countless editors and publishers. In just the last month I’ve spoken to the editor of a section of a major national newspaper, the editor of a pretty-damn sexy magazine/web brand and a couple of editors of online properties, all of whom have been struggling to find the right candidate.

You might think that this makes sense. Maybe students have been forced into a sad-but-probably-practical conservatism by the pay-for-play education in this country, and are simply deciding not to rack up monstrous debts in an effort to join a poor-paying profession in which the largest employers have been cutting their staffs every year for a decade. But that’s not it. In fact, even in the mainstream-media maelstrom of 2009, the J-schools continued to report increased applications and graduate numbers have tended to tick up in recent years too.

So there are still eager wannabe-journalists out there. And while many J-schools still don’t seem to have fully evolved their offerings for the digital age, I refuse to believe that some of these young folk aren’t smart enough to adapt to many of the exciting roles being created by the evolution of the media industry, or, indeed, to provide some cheaper labor for the mainstream players who are looking for greater cost efficiencies.

What’s more when you do that digging that I was talking about, mainly spending hours on Google looking for people reporting the kind of stuff you want them to report, you almost always uncover the gems. Maybe they’re writing their own blog, tweeting some great stuff, or reporting (unpaid or barely paid) for HuffPo.

It’s just that there’s no single hub effectively bringing together employers in the media space with the right potential employees in the media space.

That might sound like I’m snubbing Mediabistro, but I’m not. I have nothing but respect for Laurel Touby’s entrepreneurship in building that brand, and certainly it’s the closest thing we have to what I’m talking about. But even the folks at Mediabistro know (and privately admit) that jobs posted to that site often result in an e-mail flood of unqualified candidates whose pitches very rarely seem to have been tailored for the employee – in fact, in launching their new service ‘Scoop Jobs’ for would-be employees they touch on exactly this problem.

The market inefficiency appears to be at least as severe in PR. As the former editor of PRWeek, I frequently talk to agency CEOs who find re-stocking their ranks, and, in particular, hiring for account manager/director level people, to be an arduous if not impossible task. Every week I get at least one call/email/FB-message from someone looking for a good PR person, and, incredibly, they’ve sometimes already spoken to one of the candidates I suggest, which can make it feel like the pool of good junior PR people is about eight-deep.

The technology is there for someone to create the definitive and immaculately-searchable database of journalists and would-be journalists (or PR people, or business-side media execs).

It must be beautifully-simple to use, comprehensive, preferably include candidates in jobs as well as candidates actively seeking work. It also needs to get to the nitty-gritty of the candidates’ experience quickly (more quickly than the average resume), and allow the employer access to the most-recent work from that person, as well as a reliable means of contacting them.

Could Mediabistro improve on what it has now? What about Gorkana? LinkedIn? As-yet-unnamed entrepreneur? Surely there’s some big bucks to be made by someone.