MARINA DEL REY – For most of my 25 years in journalism, I have been covering the swings in the economy and the effects of those ups and downs on the lives and fortunes of Californians and other Americans. Now I am seeing the impact of the latest gyration up close and personal, in the layoffs, buyouts and restructuring that are changing the face of the news business.

It can be depressing to see friends leave or lose jobs they love, and unnerving to wonder about the viability of your own employer. But Monday, I got a glimpse of some light at the end of the tunnel, a picture of the bright side of the "creative destruction" that is reshaping the way we gather, distribute and consume information about politics and public policy.

Cutbacks in coverage of civic institutions – and dissatisfaction with the coverage that remains – is creating opportunity for a new entrepreneurial culture. For-profit companies, scrappy individual operators and nonprofit foundations are looking for a chance to step in where they see openings and a potential audience.

A conference here Monday showcased several of these efforts. The gathering focused on health care reform and was convened by people concerned about what they saw as inadequate coverage of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's failed 2007 reform proposal. But the examples went beyond health care.

Marc Cooper, a senior editor at HuffingtonPost.com, approvingly described the recent turn of events as a "revolution" allowing anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to work as a journalist. The computer, he said, has "broken the monopoly" that newspapers and television networks once had on the distribution of information.

"We've seen a seizure of the means of production," said Cooper, who also teaches journalism at the University of Southern California.

The Internet's rise has siphoned readers and viewers from print, shifting eyeballs to Web sites run by traditional media and, in some cases, newcomers. Newspapers, meanwhile, have lost advertising to sites that lack news but offer job searches, auctions or personal ads.

All of this has disrupted the status quo, but while layoffs and buy-outs have swept through the news industry, the demand for information has not abated.

The Huffington Post, created by social commentator Arianna Huffington, tries to serve that demand mostly by linking to old-fashioned journalism and offering opinion based on that reporting. Politico.com hired some of the nation's top political reporters and became a go-to spot for political junkies in the just-completed presidential campaign. TalkingPointsMemo.com offers a collection of political, social and literary criticism along with original investigative reporting on politics and government.

The latest wrinkle is the emergence of nonprofit foundations into the game. They see opportunity to make up for some of the decline in traditional news coverage and to build a broader audience for research they already have been doing.

On the national level, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently announced an initiative to cover health care policy with a team of reporters headed by two veteran journalists, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner. The founders say the $3 million operation will be independent of the foundation, which itself is separate from the health care company from which it gets its name. The stories will appear on a free Web site and will be aimed at opinion leaders and health care junkies who want to know what the government is doing for them, or to them, on a daily basis.

Kaiser Health News will join another nonprofit – ProPublica.org – that has been up and running for several months. ProPublica is funded by philanthropist Herbert Sandler (who made his fortune selling risky mortgages) and specializes in investigative reporting in "the public interest." The operation has hired some of the top reporters in the country and will publish its reports on a Web site while also teaming with television networks and other media to achieve broader distribution.

Closer to home, the California HealthCare Foundation is financing a six-month pilot project with USC's journalism school to lend reporters, researchers, photographers and editors to local newspapers for special projects on health care issues. And the Irvine and Hewlett foundations are backing Cal Express, another nonprofit endeavor that plans to hire a half-dozen journalists to fill gaps in the coverage of education and public safety issues.

Readers already concerned about what they perceive as liberal bias in the media will probably look with skepticism on coverage financed, even indirectly, by foundations that generally support more activist government. At the same time, though, conservative activists are lapping up the unique coverage offered by Flashreport.org, which features a network of Republican activists and consultants who participate in politics and write about it in real time.

If nothing else, all of these projects seem to show that as long as the public has a hunger for information, someone will try to feed it. Still to be determined is a new economic model that allows those who do the work of gathering and distributing the information to make a living at it over the long term.