First, I’d like to thank Tim for his kind words about me and the work I’m doing. His compliments were surprising. I took a class with Tim a few years ago while I was studying political science part-time at ASU and working full-time at the East Valley Tribune. It was one of Tim’s first semesters in academia. He was teaching a class on ethics, but truth be told he spent a good deal of time talking about the future of the news business. In fact, he was one of the first newspaper people I heard talk seriously about the need to find a better business model. So I commend him on his new “future of journalism” course and hope he finds answers for many of the questions he’s been asking for years. I’m also flattered that he’s paying attention to my work and career.

I’d also like to add a little bit to Tim’s analysis of Heat City, my new site, and hopefully ease some of the worry about whether what I’m doing is a sustainable business model.

Let me clear the air: It’s not. Back on Jan. 5, about 18 hours after launching Heat City, I tried to clarify what I’m doing now. “This website is no business venture,” I wrote at the time. “I wish I had a solid model to finance my work. But HEAT CITY is not it.” I mentioned at the time that I have been looking into starting a project to fund solid, investigative, community journalism in the Phoenix area, but any such venture would come along down the road. (Contact me through heatcity.org if you want to know more.)

“Still, I intend for this to be something a little special and a little different,” I wrote in that same post. “HEAT CITY will be a place for some original reporting, and soon I may ask for small donations to keep it going, but the site itself is little more than a traditional blog.”

At the time I wrote that, I hadn’t put a tip jar in the right-hand column of my blog. But after numerous people encouraged me to do so (one even sent me a check by mail to urge me on), I stuck a little widget on there and started taking gifts.

If you’re a journalist wondering whether the idea of a blog with a tip jar is potentially the way to make a living, I’ll tell you it’s not. However, if you’re like me and care about a topic, want to write about it all the time and want to ask for a little cash as a way to help offset the costs of the reporting, it’s not a bad way to go. Personally, I’ve been continually encouraged at the response from my readers. These are smart people who are engaged in their community and interested in seeing in-depth reporting within it. They write great e-mails and often give good story tips. They’re the best part about doing this. However, if you’re going to start a blog of any kind, you’re probably going to need other income. I’m a freelance journalist now and am making an extremely modest living writing for other, traditional publications. Heat City alone is not enough to sustain me, nor do I ever expect it to.

Tim would argue this is a business model. After all, asking for gifts or donations on a blog is indeed a way to help finance newsgathering. In a practical sense, however, I disagree. Heat City has been an experiment of sorts. And locally, to my knowledge, nobody else is doing anything exactly like it. However, boiled down to its basic elements, my blog is just a blog. It’s a platform to put out information. There is a revenue model, so to speak. Mine is financed largely from the other work I do, with only about 25% of my monthly earnings coming from readers of the site. But it is no business. And alone, it’s not a means of survival. I’m not sure whether subway performers have other jobs.

In real world terms, Tim has a much better model for McGuire on Media. His blog is financed by Arizona State University through endowments and student tuition. That, I would argue, is more likely to survive than any mostly self-financed blog.

Tim’s post spurred me to think a lot about the work I’m doing right now, and hopefully this helps explain it. I’d love to hear from others, though. Comment here on Tim’s site or send me an e-mail with your thoughts. (E-mail me at emailnickmartin@gmail.com.) Thanks, Tim, for keeping up the conversation that began Tuesday night on Horizon.