Call me an optimist, but the future of journalism isn't bleak | Dan Gillmor

Even as today's major journalistic institutions struggle to adapt, media startups and investigative outlets carry the torch

As we head into 2014, the 20th anniversary of the first popular web browser, we are awash in media. As consumers, creators and ultimately, collaborators, we are creating an ecosystem of information – including journalism – that grows more complex all the time.

In a few ways, notably the rising tide of crap of all kinds in media and the loss of some of the valuable journalism of the past, this is cause for deep worry. Yet there's plenty of reason for optimism, too: amid all the garbage, is more quality information than we've had access to before. Increasingly, the trick will be finding it.

In a course I'm teaching these days, I ask students to write down their media use for 24 hours. They are often surprised at the breadth, if not the depth, of what they – and, increasingly, many of us – do each day. When I did this exercise myself, several things stood out. For example, I didn't turn on a television even once, though I did watch a number of videos including one – Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue – that had been on TV. A screen is a screen is a screen? Not yet, but we're heading that way.

I was also struck that day by the shallowness of so much of what I was seeing. It wasn't just the declining quality of our local daily newspaper in California, a shadow of what it used to be – a common condition in that medium across the nation. Much of the online news, especially political and technology coverage, was an inch deep, sometimes ridiculous, and rarely insightful.

What's going on? Traditional newspapers and broadcasters seem to believe that they can shrink their way to prosperity. Online, a viral-or-die mindset dominates a new generation of traffic-grubbing enterprises that seem, despite assurances to the contrary, indifferent to being right or wrong as long as the traffic is there.

In an essay making the rounds this week, the Year We Broke the Internet, writer Luke O'Neil notes the recent spate of hoaxes and lousy journalism – including the bogus snow on the Pyramids picture and Elan Gale's airplane fiction-tweeting – and chalks it all up to the "traffic-at-all-costs mentality – veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned".

All true, and yet … look around. You'll find ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, the Center for Investigative Reporting and many others in an expanding universe of civic-minded investigative journalism.

You'll see smart people investing in for-profit ventures like Vox Media, which has a notion that advertisers will prefer quality to crap, and Medium, a platform/media play that, among other initiatives, absorbed the serious and excellent Matter "long-form" project. Maybe they're wrong; but maybe not.

The Patch experiment, a huge collection of local sites around the country, is faring poorly, and its owner, AOL, has been less and less supportive. Patch was a brute-force, corporate attack on local news in a world where the main revenue source, advertising, has eroded beyond repair. I'm glad they tried.

Look around, though, and you'll see that scores of independent local news operations are emerging. A list of "promising" local sites, maintained by journalist Michele Mclellen is growing, she reports, with progress on the revenue front as well as the journalistic one. I'm guessing that local news will be provided mostly by a legion of small startups that can never get too big, which isn't a tragedy if they support real journalism. We'll know better in a few years.

The ecosystem of quality work extends far beyond what we've traditiona