Community-funded news launches at Spot.Us

Fellow Knight News Challenge 2008 winner David Cohn took the wraps off the latest iteration of Spot.Us over the last few days, launching an engine for community-funded reporting from donation to publication.

Here’s the explanatory video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2041615&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1
Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.

I love the idea that Spot.Us could do at least three jobs:

1. Provide news organizations with investigative/enterprise content they have less funding and staff to produce on their own.
2. Provide freelancers (increasingly experienced and skilled freelancers recently out of a job at a newspaper, perhaps) with an outlet for reporting and quite possibly, a source of income.
3. Provide readers with a request line for news in their community.

Plenty more floating around about the launch and the idea today:

• Here’s Dave’s post at IdeaLab about applying an agile development strategy to this project.
• Here’s Len Witt scoring the project on the Shirky scale.
• Here’s Erick Schonfeld giving it the TechCrunch treatment.