Image by xeni via FlickrSimon one of our readers sent over a PBS article on crowd funding as a way to support journalists. In that a small town, or even a city hires a journalist to cover local events and local news, which is directly paid by micro payments to the journalist directly, or more likely to some holding company somewhere. For a small town needing part time journalist or even using money to promote popular journalists this might be an answer to saving journalism, as we know it today.

This of course assumes that we want to save journalism as it stands today.

Mark Glaser though has the idea of using the business model that some filmmakers, musicians, and even the Obama campaign made popular, the micro donation. Five dollars can help feed this starving artist, journalist, or presidential campaign. Most significantly, people are more likely to pay five dollars than make a 100 dollar donation. KEXP the local listener funded radio station in Seattle has three or four fundraisers a year, and between corporate matching funds, grants, and otherwise, they are able to do some excellent work and play some excellent music featuring new bands that would otherwise not get airplay. This kind of project has been used successfully for any number of other projects; journalism might not be a bad way to go with this one.

Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community. Source: PBS

Overall, the idea is interesting, and if people can make this work, it would be great for any number of other ways of doing business. While it might smack of pay per post, the separator is going to be quality, and that the articles will be community based and community funded. There is always the chance that money will drive the articles, especially in an election year, or over a contentious issue. The separator though is going to have to be about the quality of the article, and the impartiality of the article. Both should be better than what a blogger bangs together in 15 minutes. Journalists take some very real time to come up and develop interesting articles that bloggers might pass up. The problem is going to be keeping the information mobile enough to keep on hitting the memes that people care about and still keep the quality going.

The drawback is going to come in with investigative journalism, micro payments might not work here. Usually an in-depth investigative report takes years. There would also be another drawback, the journalist might believe that something is worthy of covering, but then also has to go do their own fundraising. That might turn off a number of purists in relationship to journalism.

I am not a journalist, but I do know that the model works, and if people want to seek donations, this is one way of continually funding the journalism model. With companies experimenting with the idea already, it will just be a matter of time to see if the idea really takes off. If it does, this might be the one way that we keep the journalism craft from dying out under the weight of the blogosphere.

Thanks Simon for the tip. If you have anything else you would like us to write about, or have a great tip like Simons, send it along, suggest (@) Techwag.com

Tags: pbs, journalism, donation, donations, model, business, trial, in-depth, drawback, quality, skill, preservation