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I’ve seen the future. Of journalism, that is.

A group of journalists in the San Francisco Bay area have set up spot.us – a new model for the way news provision works, which they are calling ‘community funded reporting’. The project is run by the ‘Center for Media Change’, who are a ‘501(c) 3 non-profit organization that enriches our culture… by facilitating the creation, development and use of new Internet-based business models to preserve the economic and professional viability of journalism.’

The idea is that people can post ideas on the site for stories they’d like to read, and then others can pledge money to fund someone to write the article. When the total needed to fund the investigation is reached, the article is written and is licenced under Creative Commons, so that anyone is free to republish it as long as the author is credited.

At the moment, it is tightly integrated with local news provision in the Bay area, but the creators hope to be able to expand its scope in the future. The idea of non-profit news has also been taken up by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, who set up his own version, ProPublica, in 2007. This one perhaps has slightly more international clout, being located in Manhattan and staffed by high-profile ex-editors, but I have to say I admire the integral optimism of what the San Fran lot are trying to do.

Just because this kind of thing looks to be the future of news-gathering doesn’t necessarily mean it is a shiny good thing, although there are positive things about these new models: if Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it is that news is becoming a consumer-lead industry, and for once this new model actually capitalises on this, handing over editorial power to the people.

However, there are also potential problems – what has come to be called ‘crowdfunding’ could allow certain groups to pursue a particular agenda by funding an investigation. When you get right down to it, you have to decide if there’s a difference between a small community funding an investigation into local education in order to attract government funding for their local school, and a multinational tobacco company funding research that claims smoking is good for you. They have different ends (which can be judged accordingly) but the means by which they are achieved are the same.

Advertising revenue has long been the life-support of the traditional media, so the decline caused by the current economic climate is accelerating us towards this kind of innovation. Online advertising (banner ads, autoplay videos and flash roll-overs) are annoying, but have become accepted as a necessary evil of the online world. (You can do something about it if it really gets to you).

However, there is a possibility that we’ve been approaching online ads from the wrong end: Matthew Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter, has put forward an interesting proposition: in analysing the traffic stats of his own sites, he found that if he rewarded his regular visitors by filtering out the ads, the ‘drive-by click-throughs’ of the occasional search-driven visitors increased, as well as incentivising regular readers to become members of his site in order to avoid the ads and thus improving their experience of the site. Obviously, if the ads work on a per-impression basis or are really targeted at the core readership of the site, this isn’t going to work, but for scatter-gun pay-per-click stuff, it could be very valuable.

Media-types have been banging on about the death of print for years now, and it’s getting very tedious. Instead of eulogising, they need to get on with coming up with what’s going to replace it. I’ve just listed a few examples here, and they all have their downsides, but collectively, it seems like it’s this kind of action that is going to take us forward.