Seems like everyday there’s another story about a newspaper downsizing, going online only, or shutting its doors completely. It’s not particularly surprising: Online readership is growing while paper circulation continues to shrink. Despite it’s growth, though, online news does not generate near the revenue newspapers do. This makes many wonder what will happen to investigative journalism as newspapers disappear.
Here’s something that might help: The Huffington Post has announced the creation of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. The fund will be operated as a non-profit and provide funding for both staff writers and freelancers. Writers can submit ideas for stories, and those chosen by the fund’s editors will receive the support they need to complete the work. And, everything produced by the fund (which will include a variety of different medias) will be released free for anyone to publish.
I think this is great news for bloggers. Some that are doing original work can now get paid for their reporting. And other bloggers will have a new source for articles to link to and possibly republish.
Funds like this will definitely be a part of the future of journalism, so it will be interesting to see how well this project works.
