As often happens when conservatives gather at major events, the conversation at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference turned to the future of journalism and how to get the conservative perspective on the world into news coverage.

Michael Calderone, the senior media reporter at The Huffington Post, recapped the discussion in an essay today. Here’s the gist of it:

It’s not that conservatives don’t already have a number of right-leaning media outlets. Anyone strolling through the CPAC exhibition hall in recent days saw booths from several right-of-center magazines (American Spectator, Human Events, American Conservative, Weekly Standard), a couple newspapers (Washington Examiner, Washington Times) and conservative watchdog organizations (Media Research Center/NewsBusters, Accuracy in Media). …

But despite those long-running publications and organizations — along with National Review and newer online outlets, like the Tucker Carlson-led Daily Caller and Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” sites — conservatives still say there’s a long way to go in combating the influence of the establishment media, along with convincing young conservatives that there’s a viable career path in reporting.

I was part of the conservative media world for a couple of years and regularly shared my own thoughts on how to improve it. Calderone’s coverage of the CPAC conversation reminded me of another idea that has been germinating inside my head.

I call it the eBay of investigative journalism, and here’s how I envision it:

• Bring donors and investigators together in an exclusive online network, creating a forum where they could pitch ideas to each other.
• Donors in the network who want specific topics covered would propose stories and agree to fund the investigations. Journalists in the network would bid on the projects, outlining how much money they need. Multiple donors could contribute to each project.
• Project pitches would work the opposite direction, too, with investigative journalists outlining their own ideas and donors “buying in” by providing the funds. Donors could contribute the full amount to fund projects they really like or fund parts of multiple projects. Journalists also could pitch ideas as teams or recruit teams within the network.
• The network would have a team of editorial directors whose job would be to vet the donors, journalists and ideas. Only the best would make the cut, just like applying for media jobs.

This would be a double-blind network. Donors would contribute money toward good investigative ideas (their own or those of journalists). They would not know which journalists won the work until after publication, and they could not influence the direction of the stories they fund.
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