The AP reports that Huffington Post is announcing the creation of a $1.75 million fund with various donors to pay for investigative reporting. First target: the economy.
This, I've long held, is where foundation and public support will enter into the new ecosystem of journalism: not by taking over newspapers but by funding investigations and other slices of a new journalistic pie.
I've been hoping to get the resources to preform an audit of the current resource allocation in journalism: Take a town, add up all the journalistic spending there (paper, TV, radio, magazine) and then see how much is spent on investigative reporting (I'll wager it will be tiny; a fraction of a percent of the total) as well as the beat reporting that feeds it - and judge the value of the results.
When we see that number, I predict, it will be feasible to imagine support from foundations and the public (that is, in the NPR and Spot.US models) to pay for investigative journalism. Indeed, I'll bet that we could multiply the amount spent on and the output of investigative reporting today. This is how to subsidize news. It's happening now, as ProPublica stories run in The New York Times. That is a form of subsidy.
Now to touch the third rail in the debate over the future of news: This is how paid content will work, how news will get money from its public -- not by putting content behind walls and charging all readers (the few who'll remain) to see it but instead by setting up systems to take advantage of the 1 percent rule online that decrees you need only a limited number of contributors (of money or effort) to support great things in a gift economy. See: Wikipedia and NPR. But the public's contributions won't go to lifting the sinking Titanics of the old-media failures; I don't want to contribute to failed newspapers anymore than I want my tax money to go to failed banks and their dividends and salaries. Instead, contributions will need to go directly to supporting work people care about.
The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as the one HuffPost is announcing.