Note: I am not disappearing from NewAssignment.net, Beat Blogging, NewsTrust or Broowaha, but I am taking a serious step back to work on a new project: Spot Us, which will be a nonprofit that enables community funded reporting. I will use the lessons I have learned from the above sites and my personal blog to build something unique and empowering for journalism.

THE NEWS: I have won a Knight News Challenge grant to build a site that will support community funded reporting. For those who just want the news via the Knight Foundation go here. If you want to see for yourself what I hope to build, go check it out: Spot Us!

If you want to know my more organized thoughts, keep reading. Also note: my next post (which will be at my personal blog and Spot Us will be a video explaining the idea of Spot.us in more detail and how I see the organization growing…with your input. So stay tuned.

Below you’ll find.

• A small polemic on the state of journalism as I see it and how I got here.
• Where the idea for Spot Us came from.
• What Spot Us is in a nutshell.
• How you can help…. more coming soon.

The journalism blogosphere has matured over the years. We are no longer in a state of pure panic. Surely the news industry has issues it needs to figure out, but I like to think we are self-aware and moving forward. There is a strong community of people who are ready to push forward at all costs. I believe that is the very community the Knight Foundation wants to find and support with the Knight News Challenge grants.

Yet, so much of our conversation is directed towards those who lay outside our echo chamber.

We’ve become a choir of sorts. We all agree things need to change, but so much of our time and our course of action towards this end has continually been to look backwards to convince more people to essentially ‘get on board with the following basic principles.’ Those principles being varied - but they live on the web in some form or other.

I propose a new course of action, if only to myself. ‘To geek out on journalism.’

What do I mean to ‘geek out’?

The Urban Dictionary: "To engage in a conversation of a highly technical nature, typically with some other members of the party you are with, completely (and usually inadvertently) alienating others in the process."

Geeking out doesn’t mean you are talking about computers. To geek out, as I understand it, is to be passionate something, in this case a craft and dedicated to developing your skills and knowledge.

You can geek out about Star Wars, computers…. why not journalism? Where’s the social space to geek out about news in your community?

The road lay ahead of me. I’m tired of repeating "my readers know more than I do." It is a sage piece of wisdom, without a doubt. The community of bloggers I referred to as the ‘choir’ above wouldn’t be as developed and sharp without that motto. But I want to know what’s beyond it. Specifically I want to know how dedicated journalists can sustain themselves while serving readers.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my young career having worked on many interesting journalism projects. NewAssignment.net has been, without a doubt, the largest platform from which I could jump beyond myself into the void of what journalism could become in the future. I don’t know what journalism looks like in the future - but I am certain it is participatory in some form or other.

As Jay Rosen said (not a direct quote) from the beginning of NewAssignment.net: We aren’t sure what the answers are, but we know we can learn by trying. Even if in failing we can post up a skull and crossbones sign saying "don’t go this way" - we have contributed to the future of journalism.

It was through NewAssignment.net that I met Jeff Jarvis who let me co-organize the Networked Journalism Summit. If NewAssignment.net was a ladder I climbed, organizing that event was the fun jump into a cannonball splash. At the end of it, I felt I had a better understanding of the journalism community, industry and social media in general.

If I am a ‘journalism’ geek’ I’m also a bit of a tech-geek as well. I’m no hacker - but I love technology. It was through that interest in technology that I believe, and as Amy Gahran eloquently put it once to me, I escaped the event horizon of traditional journalism. I am a journalist born on the web. My first real writing gig was for Wired.com. While working at Seed Magazine I dove in further - using Web 2.0 tools to aid and abed my reporting. It started with Digg (which turned into working for Propeller and NewsTrust.net) and other social news sites. After finishing at Columbia’s J-school I was more interested in donating time to a citizen journalism network, Broowaha, than working for a newspaper. The pay would have been better at a newspaper - but I feared that at an organization I wouldn’t be able to push forward.

That’s where I’ve been. So what’s next? Spot Us will be a nonprofit to test a new business model - community funded journalism.

After Assignment Zero, Jeff Howe hired me as his research assistant for the upcoming book "Crowdsourcing." One area that I researched in-depth and became fascinated with was the chapter on ‘crowdfunding.’

I learned the narratives of Kiva.org, Prosper, Chip-in, DonorsChoose, Fundable, SellaBand and more. It was in the thick of this research that I began to wonder how this revolutionary business model could be applied to journalism.

It could be a form of participatory journalism that got around what Jeff Howe described as one of the main barriers to citizen journalism: "getting citizen journalists to write long-form articles was like asking them to re-do their college mid-term papers." Point is - not everyone has the time to contribute to the process of enterprise reporting - but perhaps they can contribute towards its production by donating money instead. This isn’t a knock on citizen journalism. I do believe "my readers know more than I do" and I’ve dedicated the last few years of my life towards exploring it. But I also recognize that some stories require LOTS of time to report and write. Citizen journalists are such because they have other jobs. Their day jobs give them expertise that I don’t have - including the ability to recognize stories that fall through the cracks.

The technology couldn’t be THAT hard, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t be creating a NEW type of technology - I would just be utilizing the power of the web, to aggregate like-minded people (and their pocketbooks), and apply it towards journalism - or more precisely, towards the processes of journalism.

What I’m going to build will be a marketplace for journalism. News organizations (old or new media) can use the space to support their most enterprise projects. Community and civic organizations can come together, take a stand and let the media know what is being under-reported. Independent journalists can get paid to do what they do best - report on local stories, all while building up their portfolio.

It’s often said that blogs lowered the barrier to opine on anything. What we need to do is lower the barrier that lets people direct reporters towards issues that need more than opining - but real in-depth reporting. Currently the barrier to entry is very high - you have to be an editor with a budget. Very few people have that luxury.

Other options to fund journalism are starting to bubble-up including nonprofit models such as ProPublica, which I support. But, if the Sandler family can donate $25 million to create a news organization, then the Smith family should be able to donate $25 towards an independent journalist. And if enough Smith families all put down $25 - that should say something to us!

Now, I already know the internal idealistic journalist in your head, reading this post along with you, is getting nervous. Mine is too. There are certain practices and principles which I think need to be preserved. But having journalism appear in print with advertising or subscription based business models aren’t any of them. Ask yourself - ‘do we NEED any of those three things to make journalism happen’? What we do need are reporters going out and reporting!!!

What I want to keep are the principles of journalism that make it a public service. It is what we often call "enterprise reporting." Journalism that makes a difference by informing, connecting and exposing. The type of journalism that keeps our communities strong and democratic.

I will not turn my back on what I believe makes journalism unique from other types of content on the web. My aim is to see if we can support this type of content with a new business model - based on a gift economy.

I’m currently working on the details, which as you can imagine are many and varied. I hope to make the process through which I make decisions as open as possible. I built this as a nonprofit for several reasons -  one was just to ensure the wider journalism community that I am not in this for money - I earnestly want to build something that will empower journalism.

How you can help at this stage.

• Sign up for an email update when we launch our public beta. Or subscribe to the blog. Do both at Spot Us.
• Spread the word
• Contact me. Like I said - I want this to be as open as possible. I might not be able to respond to every email but I will read them and I will try.

For now. I intend to geek out on: the principles, business and process of journalism in an open and distributed world.

ONWARD!!!!