Newspapers are dying across the country. Local papers are shutting down, Gannett is laying off 3,000 people, the Christian Science Monitor will no longer put out a print edition, and even the New York Times is facing a serious cash crunch. Can citizen journalism fill in the gaps?

David Cohn thinks so. Today, he launches Spot.Us, a not-for-profit experiment in community-funded journalism. The site is a hub where freelance journalists can pitch story ideas and readers can pitch in money to pay the journalists to report and write the story. The focus of the site is on local, community issues around the San Francisco Bay area—the kind that supposedly get short shrift by city newspapers. But Cohn hopes to expand the concept to other communities.