Crowdfunding the answer?

Can anything save the journalism business?

One buzz word that seems to be going around is crowdfunding and it all stems from an aarticle written by Mark Glazer over at Media Shift.

So what is Crowdfunding?

Basically it is creating a link bewteen the journalist and what people percieve is content wiorth paying for.

Over at Spot.us the concept is very simple.

1.Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.

2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.

3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).

4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.

5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.

Will it work?

Well it is early days at the moment.The project has been funded by the Knight's Trust and is run by journalist David Cohn.

It certainly has potential for the local interest or specialist journalism.

But I wonder with the link between funder and journalist very direct,is their a ethical content issue here.