Here’s the explanatory video:

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.

Related Posts

• How to turn every reader’s mobile phone into a newsroom of one
• What I would fund: An imaginary challenge for news business models
• I happen to know some people with ideas.