Spot.us, a crowd sourcing funding model for investigative journalism began life as a Knight Foundation digital challenge. Some years later, it becomes a part of the public broadcasting system by merging with the Public Insight Network, a project of American Public Media. The producer and distributer of Marketplace, APM operates the Public Insight Network as a 130,000-person database of people who make themselves available as sources to respond to journalistic queries that are looking for individuals with certain experiences, characteristics or areas of expertise.

The crowdsourcing project of PIN held some promise for countering the often default journalistic position of consulting a narrow band of authoritative experts over and over again. However it is not clear how often PIN-generated sources are used and how often they appear in significant roles in the final stories that are generated by PIN-posting writers and editors. The PIN website featured 2 stories featuring sources from PIN, one on a November 2012 vote on gay marriage in Minnesota and another on the lifting of a Sunday hunting ban in Pennsylvania. Current queries from reporters requested Iraq vets to opine on their job hunting results and working class men to comment on their declining salaries.

Spot.us provided (usually) microdonations from donors, who clicked on the website to express a desire to support independent, investigative journalism and could select from an assortment of story pitches from journalists to directly support with donations, often in the $5-$25 range, although some donated larger amounts. Spot.us also developed surveys for advertisers and on the completion of a survey, site visitors got a small amount of free bonus bucks to donate to the story of their choice. Most Spot.us pitches ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and took 1-6 months on the site to attract the desired level of support. Spot.us cites 6.000 donors and 2,500 multiple donors.

With crowd sourced funding joining crowd sourced expertise, the question now is whether content creation  will be the next journalistic piece to dabble with a crowd sourcing model. Best of 3 potential writers voted on with a click?

Anything is possible within a framework of enormous change.