Crowdfunding

So I have stumbled onto the concept of crowdfunding recently.  I find myself again, talking about how media will be funded in the future.  Could crowdfunding be the answer?  Here's how it works: Traditionally, journalists, freelance or not, would pitch their pieces or be assigned them by editors of publications, who would then pay for the costs of doing the reporting.  However, as I'm pretty sure the whole world is aware of now, newspapers are not doing well.  Losing ad revenue because of the poor economy, is compounded by lower circulation numbers due to free online formats.  With the current model failing a lot of people, journalists have begun to use online networks to raise small amounts of money from a large group of people for their projects.  This has the effect of somewhat "democratizing" journalism, allowing people to choose what articles are written, whether that is a good thing is up for debate.  On the one hand, people can demand that journalists cover topics that large institutions such as newspapers or news networks might avoid because the have too much to lose.  On the other, it further polarizes society as groups of like-minded people cluster around ideas and journalists who are willing to support them, until journalism completely descends into a mere exercise of self-reaffirmation.  Whether it's good or bad or somewhere in between, it's scalability has yet to be seen.  If you want to know more about the details of crowdfunding, here is a really good article from MediaShift. There are numerous sites that act as hubs to help writers and filmmakers find funders such as: