There’s no cure-all to fix the news business, but Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has proposed directing stimulus money to help support it at this especially precarious moment. “News-industry experts have been predicting for years that a recession of severe economic downturn would deliver a death blow to these already troubled businesses,” Sullivan writes. “And now a public health crisis has come along to threaten exactly that.” One idea, proposed last week by Craig Aaron, president and co-CEO of Free Press, argued for a stimulus package that would double federal funds for public media, provide direct support to fund local news coverage, and seed a “First Amendment Fund” to support new positions and approaches to newsgathering. Among other steps to support local news, the Atlantic echoed the idea of federal support, proposing that the government “funnel $500 million in spending for public-health ads through local media” as part of its future stimulus plans.

Meanwhile, Ben Smith seems to want to rip the band-aid off. In his latest New York Times media column, Smith calls for “a painful but necessary shift” for saving the news business: look to the future. “Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms,” Smith writes, arguing that getting through this crisis requires confronting the reality that “the revenue from print advertising and aging print subscribers was already going away” and “when the crisis is over, it is unlikely to come back.” A large part of the stimulus money that some have advocated for could, Smith warns, go to already-doomed newspaper chains. He instead suggests building new institutions to support local journalists in the form of a new network of nonprofit organizations, citing the Texas Tribune as a promising model of this kind, and small businesses like subscription sites and newsletters.