Here is a non-profit news cooperative that has the New York Times as one of its clients. Let’s see where this all leads. Hopefully a viable option for boots on the ground professional journalism.

“Let’s put it this way, it’s not my paper,” Mr. O’Shea said of The Tribune. “I wish them all the luck in the world, I don’t want to see them get hurt, but it doesn’t have the heft and the seriousness that it had.”

That is mild compared with the assessment of Mr. Warren, dismissed from The Tribune last year and now the publisher of The Chicago Reader, a weekly.

“In their mind, they’ve made it a more populist, local, utilitarian paper, and I think they’ve made it narrower, more lightweight, fueled by reflexive suspicion of the traditional ideas of serious journalism,” he said. “It’s a different value system. There’s a fabulous staff at The Tribune, but I think they’re just underserved by their leaders.”

Even so, “I’ve got no desire to weaken anybody” or exact retribution, he said. “I want as many healthy news outlets as possible.” He and Mr. O’Shea said the idea for the news cooperative came from Peter Osnos, a journalist and author who never worked for The Tribune.

via Ex-Editor of Chicago Tribune Leads Upstart Competitor – NYTimes.com.