The future of news depends on non-profit organizations. That was the message from Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor and vice president at large of The Washington Post. He gave the final keynote speech to a thinning crowd of business journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual convention Sunday.

Downie discussed the many types of news organizations that have emerged in the wake of newspapers’ decline, focusing mostly on non-profit models, and then outlined his recommendations to help these new ventures survive. He based much of his speech on a massive report he recently co-wrote wrote, The Reconstruction of American Journalism.

Here’s a video of Downie discussing his recommendations. After the video is a list of the innovative news models he identified.

Here are the innovative news models he identified, with some examples:

Partnerships between universities and professional news organizations.

• Florida International University in southern Florida provides student reporting to The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post, and Sun Sentinel.

Downie said pro journalists shouldn’t be concerned about students taking their jobs. “More importantly, you have a healthy amount of collaboration,” he said. Professional journalists may have to scrap by with multiple jobs, Downie said, because gone are the days of high newspaper salaries from the last half of the 20th Century.

For-profit local news sites and aggregators

• San Diego News Network [disclosure: I work for the US Local News Network, the parent company of SDNN]. It combines stories from its own reporters with content from local community newspapers, radio, and television stations, and from bloggers, freelancers and wire services.

Independent non-profit local news organizations

• Voice of San Diego is supported by foundations, advertising, corporate sponsorships, and contributions from citizen “members,” similar a public radio station.

Hyperlocal news sites, both non-profit and for-profit, that cover neighborhoods. Many are experimenting with “pro-am” journalism, or collaboration with users, Downie said.

• Some examples are the nonprofit New Haven Independent in Connecticut and the for-profit New West network of Web sites in Montana.

Also, more public radio stations are gathering and reporting local news : Downie said, “It needs to be encouraged and it needs to grow a lot more now.”

He acknowledged that there will be some viable for-profit news organizations, but said they were too experimental to know which would work and which would not. So Downey’s focusing on recommendations for non-profit news: “Non-profits will have to succeed,” he said.