We’ve already talked a lot about Spot.us‘ crowdfunded investigative reports. I recently got hipped to UK startup, Help Me Investigate. HMI, instead, helps journalists find sources/interns to build their stories. , Which is also a neat model. Their founder, Paul Bradshaw, explains it like this:

The key idea behind the site is that it breaks down investigations into different elements, which are called challenges. There are certain things that journalists will be good at, like writing up the story, or getting an official response, or finding particularly hard to find information, like company information or regulations. But there is a lot of specialist knowledge on the site. One particularly big user of the site works in a financial firm, analysing things forensically, so he’s got tremendously valuable data analysis skills which few journalists have, and he’s able to bring that to figures that we get from freedom of information requests. Then there are people who use the site who are particularly knowledgeable about property, or about law. We had an investigation into clamping, and we had a retired law lecturer who added a legal interpretation of the law surrounding clamping and what to do, so that’s been tremendously useful. It’s really about playing to people’s strengths.

(seen here)