Jay Rosen at New York University doubts it will be easy to replace your daily metro newspaper with an online equivalent. But if the current business is folding, he’s deeply concerned about building a viable model that serves the public, enhance debate and strengthens citizenship.

The majority of web content, especially news, flows from journalism published in newspapers and magazines, and Rosen says one of the steps toward building a new media system — an open-source system — is measuring the old one:

Expecting amateurs to step in is dumb, and it won’t happen. But before we can face this matter of “replace” head on, we at least need some current numbers.

Once we know in a ballpark way what the newspaper journalism, replacement level is, we at least know how far we have to go in realizing some comparable framework for a new system.

To explore this point, the professor is inviting readers to tally the amount of locally researched journalism in the city paper they read each day.

The count was launched modestly when Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) put out a Tweet this morning:

So here’s my idea: let’s start counting the number of homegrown stories our newspapers run that we need to… replace

And then:

#replaceniks Back-of-a-Tweet sketch. Take your daily. Look at every page. Count homegrown public service news stories. Post the results.

(A replacenik is Rosen’s term for those who believe amateur bloggers and citizen journalists will be able to step in and do the work of professional reporters.)

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Review of Journalism wrote that most dailies still produce “top-notch journalism, often heroically and under intense and intensifying pressure,” which makes it that much harder to equal and replace:

But this is interesting because if we’re going to figure out the next model we need to know what exactly we’re “replacing”—to use that term. I love newspapers as much as anybody, but many are ghosts of their former selves, and becoming more spectral seemingly every day. It’s getting less and less difficult to “replace” them.

There aren’t just U.S. mastheads on Rosen’s tally; today’s issue of the Edmonton Journal was counted, and I added yesterday’s edition of the Vancouver Sun. Conceivably, new numbers could be posted each day.

For more press theorizing and strategizing from Rosen, read his Flying Seminar in the future of news.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife. Copies of the San Francisco Chronicle roll off the press in September, 2007.