By King Kaufman: Newsosaur Alan Mutter wonders, "Can grassroots journalism do the job?"

My old boss Will Hearst once said, "If there's a question mark at the end of a headline, the story won't answer the question." Actually, Hearst was, I think, the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of my boss' boss, and he had a few bosses himself. But anyway. It was a good point.

And yet, Mutter has the answer: No. At least he doesn't think so. Though Mutter himself has reminded us we shouldn't forget he's in the business of creating a system by which professional journalists can make money. So he'd be kind of an odd guy to say that grassroots journalism can do the job, yessiree, wouldn't he?

"While it is true that the hard work of one or a handful of highly motivated individuals can create something worth reading for as long as their enthusiasm holds out," Mutter writes, "the time and hard work involved in serious reporting seems to suggest even the most impressive grassroots projects will be condemned to relatively short life spans."

And I'm tired of writing this post so the hell with it.

Just kidding. As a case study, Mutter points to the Gannett blog -- which points right back, how meta. The Gannett Blog was launched in 2007 by former USA Today editor and writer Jim Hopkins, who has announced he's shutting it down soon. He'd been chronicling the internal workings at the media giant through these troubled times by crowd-sourcing the 40,000-plus Gannett employees.

Mutter calls this a hyperlocal enterprise, though the locality is a company, not a geographic location. And even with a source crowd of journalism professionals and a readership hungry for the information he was aggregating, Hopkins says he couldn't make enough money and wore himself out trying. He also mentions that he was committed to reading every comment, and that this had become "psychologically harmful" as fearful workers got more upset and angry.

I don't think the Gannett Blog qualifies as hyperlocal. It's more like a niche-based site. It has more in common with a blog about a hobby or a certain genre of music than it has with something like Voice of San Diego.

A readership in one physical location is attractive to advertisers and, say, event sponsors in a way that employees of one company, spread across the country, are not.

But that doesn't mean Mutter's basic point is wrong.

"Even where the will to go forward remains powerful," he writes, "there is no satisfactory answer to the practical question of how long talented, capable and motivated individuals can afford to commit themselves to self-assigned journalistic endeavors that so far are not known to have generated any appreciable income for the writers."

Not yet.