Lord Stephen Carter's Digital Britain roadshow has identified the declining quality of regional journalism as one of the problems that it has to solve.

And it offers a plan - for most of Britain. But, bizarrely, the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport is offering nothing for Northern Ireland.

A surprising decision, given our extraordinary need for responsible journalism.

The global forces that are so quick to pump billions in to maintain our managerial top-down political processes are entirely missing the importance of local media and enabling it to build from the bottom upwards.

As Thomas Jefferson put it: "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter."

Yet on top of the significant slice that is currently being made out of the 700 jobs at the BBC in Northern Ireland (which will surely impact on news gathering) and hefty cuts at UTV in recent years, there are rumours that more journalists are being made redundant at the Irish News.

It's some years now since the Belfast Telegraph hired a new reporter and the News Letter is also critically understaffed.

Elsewhere, outside Belfast, reporters are also being laid off hand-over-fist and local radio has consolidated.

Bob Geldof was absolutely right to criticise the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for its abandonment of Northern Ireland and its apparent reluctance to open up the bidding for a pilot scheme to test the viability of Independently Funded News Consortium (IFNC).

Nelson McCausland MLA - who is in favour of such a pilot - told the Culture, Arts and Leisure Committee that a pilot would be valued at £3m per year over three years.

The idea of bringing a potential £3m a year into the news gathering ecology of Northern Ireland is hugely attractive at the moment.

A pilot project would not only bring in new money - it would also bring in a massive amount of intellectual capital and creativity to bear on the problem of Northern Ireland's dying news media.

And let's be clear: £3m a year will only staunch some of the flow.

The net result - even if the DCMS were to undo their odd decision - will still be that there would be significantly fewer journalists than there were a few short years ago here.

Bids would have to show how they can plug so many of the gaps that an increasingly monopolistic and Belfast-centric media have allowed to emerge in recent years.

Any bid would have to put journalistic boots on the ground and run against the tide that's sweeping them away.

Many of us have failed to notice that council meetings, courts and important civic functions are no longer reported.

A massive gap is emerging where the only thing left is radio phone-in Nolan (and Slugger O'Toole-style) commentary.

Free comment is a good thing, of course, but the growing lack of sacred facts underpinning it is shocking.

All over the UK, hacks are leaving the profession and filling the burgeoning ranks of government PRs.

In England, many local authorities have become so frustrated with the refusal of the remaining local Press to report their work seriously that they have started producing their own papers.

We have 26 councils at the moment - this is being restructured and boiled down to 11 by 2011.

It's probably fair to say that a lot of them are a bit demob-happy at the moment, and they don't have the ambition to meet this challenge.

But when (if?) we get our leaner, reformed councils, this may change dramatically - putting new pressures on local media.

Writing in the Washington Post a few weeks ago,Robert W McChesney and John Nichols put it starkly thus:

"The problem is that newspaper newsrooms are disappearing, and neither broadcast nor digital media are filling the void.

"Barack Obama is right when he says that finding a model to pay journalists to question, analyse and speak truth to power 'is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy.'

"For the first time in American history, we are nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation's size) dedicated to reporting the news.

"The prospect that this 'information age' could be characterised by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real. So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.

"Our constitution is predicated on the assumption of an informed and participating citizenry. If insufficient news media exist to make that a realistic outcome, the foundation crumbles."

We've got a bit of an experiment going on here, too. Three million pounds a year is a very small amount of money and it could create a huge amount of capacity in Northern Ireland. The DCMS needs to change its mind on this one.

Mick Fealty is founding editor of Slugger O'Toole - Northern Ireland's leading political blog