From Tides Momentum Conference - Lloyd Nimetz on the future of journalism

At the Tides Momentum conference, I spotted a social entrepreneur among the activists.  David Cohn is betting on his crowd-funded initiative Spot.us to be the future model for professional journalism.  He calls it 'community funded reporting'.  If you want an article written, you can submit a story idea and see if the crowd funds the story.  Spot.us has a team of freelance reporters on stand-by ready to work on stories that receive sufficient funding to cover the corresponding costs of investigative reporting.  It's like Donorschoose but instead of funding school teachers, you are funding articles.  It's a fascinating model and experiment that makes a lot of sense although will inevitably have many nay-sayers who don't believe the general public or those with more disposable income should be able to influence reporting - a legitimate charge but not much different from the corporate marketing budgets influencing newspapers and magazines today.

Read more at http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/the-edge/archive/2009/09/10/crowdsourced-journalism