The immediate response is one where skepticism plays anchor to hope: Could crowd-funding of real journalism work to actually, you know, save journalism?

Good ideas are always ruined by realities of humanity and this human reality involves not just money but bidding. It’s not just bidding, but it pulls from the masses instead of the elite. The only thing more corrupt than the elite is the masses.

At least the elite can be thrown over a cliff (or beneath a guillotine in one century) for misdeeds against the masses. But what happens when the masses are guilty? Does everybody just go home dodging accusatory fingers? Is a sacrificial lamb appointed?

Yikes, talk about a catch 22. But it will be fun to watch the experiment Spot.us is currently perpetrating in Northern California—David Cohn was able to talk the Knight Foundation out of $340,000 to give it a shot.

Before we get into how this crowd-funded journalism works, let’s address the present crisis. Media conglomerates own your news and with the help of the Internet and cable TV have created a 24-hour news cycle. While that’s been happening, traditional newspapers have been losing subscribers, money, and firing journalists. Bottom line: the watchdogs are employed by those they used to watch, and the formerly watched have pushed for more news in shorter time spans, which means less time and funding to investigate the flood of press releases in the inbox, often from PR/lobbying organizations hired by the formerly watched.

And then there’s blogging, good for the proletariat, bad for anybody actually looking for (expensive) truths. Investigative journalism, it is feared, is on the outs because nobody can afford it any more except those who’d rather nobody investigated at all.

Spot.us, then, thinks the answer is some good old-fashioned grassroots ingenuity, the kind that raised all that money for Barack Obama. Think the mayor is on the take from local contractors? Propose an investigation and donate $5 toward funding a report. If enough other people want that story investigated and are willing to fork over some cash to accomplish it, then you’ve got yourself an investigative reporter on the case.

Nobody guarantees he or she is a good reporter, but at least there’s somebody looking into it, right? And there’s that thing with the bidding: seems ripe for abuse, seems subject to similar problems we have today, as suddenly large sums of cash flow in toward particular stories in order to distract from certain other pesky stories.

But perhaps there’ll be a mechanism in place to control for rigs—and you know there’ll be attempts at rigging if this gets off the ground. But hey, it’s better than sitting on our citizen journalistic heels, right?

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