Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovation ideas in local news delivery) winner David Cohn’s project, Spot.Us launched yesterday.

An overview of the project:

As David posted on his blog:

The problem: Revenue.

Journalism is a process not a product, but that process takes time and people who do it professionally need to be compensated.

The Solution: Community Funding.

The process of journalism should be participatory – and perhaps one way it can be made participatory is if the public has the opportunity to commission the journalism they want to see.

Traditionally .001% of the public has a freelance budget to hire a journalist. We call those people “editors.” Spot.Us is an attempt to increase the percentage of people that can have an editorial influence.

Congratulations to David and the Spot.Us team; we look forward to watching this project continue to develop–