Would you be willing to kick in $20 to have someone get to the bottom of the murky finances at your kid's school? How about contributing $30 to find out if your trash haulers really sift recyclables from the garbage, like they claim?
If that sounds intriguing, I give you David Cohn.
Cohn is a skinny young man of abundant enthusiasm who's primed to pump energy, and cash, into what sometimes feels like the world's most beleaguered profession: journalism.
He is the founder of Spot.us, a website that allows the public to propose stories and pay for journalists to do investigations "on important and perhaps overlooked stories."
On the website, visitors leave story tips and reporters pitch formal proposals, trying to persuade other folks to contribute $5, $100, whatever, to turn ideas into stories. Journalists on the site generally ask for $500 to $1,000. (And individuals can give a maximum of 20%, so no one person can have an undue stake in the story.)
That groundbreaking model has helped Spot.us to midwife and then post six stories in its first three months. Supporters have ponied up enough for six more stories, with five other writers in pursuit of donations for their ideas.
The finished stories appear on the site, although Cohn hopes to sell exclusive rights to future work to websites, newspapers or other outlets. In such cases, the initial "micro-donors" could recoup their investments.
Stories have so far focused around the project's Bay Area home base. The pieces have explored bay pollution, the expanding elderly population and sewage processing. Others in the works will delve into San Francisco's wealth disparity and police tensions in Oakland.
It's hard not to root for Cohn, 26, who had the chutzpah to try something new, the tenacity to get it off the ground and the maturity to know that it might not work.
God and Google know the old, monopolistic print advertising model will never make a full-scale comeback. So more power to any endeavor trying to push serious journalism into a new era.
Yes, there is a "but." To wit: The site's platform outperforms its product. Spot.us stories simply need to be better. The four I checked out -- three written and one a radio report -- did not particularly engage, incite or entertain.
A three-part series on how Bay Area communities are planning for a booming elderly population let experts drone on, while giving almost no voice to its actual subject: old people.
