Welcome to a grand experiment!

Hello. We are getting underway an interesting experiment in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. We want to tell you about it, but first, a little background.

Tom Johnson was publisher of the Daily Pilot for 17 years, before leaving in the summer of 2008. Bill Lobdell was editor of the Pilot for a decade, before going on to work for the Los Angeles Times. He left The Times in July to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.

Together at the Pilot, we took a newspaper at death's door, with staggering losses of $250,000 a month, and turned it into a nicely profitable media company with a tight relationship with the Newport-Mesa community.

In recent times, the Pilot's corporate owner has severely damaged Newport-Mesa's beloved daily, and we fear for its future. Many of our friends still work at the paper under increasingly trying conditions, and we admire their efforts.

But the fact is, the Pilot is a shell of what it once was and could be. Worse, in our opinion, is that the Pilot's business model just won't work in the 21st century, as advertising revenue and readership migrates quickly to the Web.

But Newport Beach and Costa Mesa -- which has had the Pilot for more than 100 years -- deserves a quality paper, a publication that keeps watch over local government, reports in-depth on local schools, provides independent leadership and, perhaps most of all, unites the community like nothing else can.

So we've decided to conduct this experiment that we're calling, "Operation Local News." Our hypothesis is this: The Newport Beach and Costa Mesa community will support financially a robust, engaging, thought-provoking and comprehensive news operation that is on the cutting-edge of technology but has old-fashioned newspaper values.

Our financial model mirrors that of National Public Radio or PBS, with the majority of the funding coming from readers, corporations and foundations--not advertising. This approach has shown great promise for news websites such as Voice of San Diego and Pro Publica. We think it can work in Newport-Mesa, an affluent community that in the past has been passionate about its local paper.

Operating as a nonprofit, our ultimate goal is to create an endowment that would allow the news organization to operate without financial pressure long after we're gone from the scene. It's impossible to calculate the incredible value that a high-quality local online paper would add to the Newport-Mesa community. We think that would be a nice legacy to leave.

We'll update this site each time we have news about the experiment. Unlike old media, it's part of our culture to be as transparent as possible, allowing you to watch as the experiment unfolds. We may find out that there's not enough support to keep a daily local news presence in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. But we suspect otherwise.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting.