Last week, we took a look at how bloggers are emerging as a new breed of investigative journalists in an era of massive cutbacks at traditional media outlets across the country. Today, I’d like to delve into another way that everyday citizens are picking up the slack. It’s called “crowdfunding” – and it offers all of us an opportunity to shine the media spotlight on the stories we want told.

A few weeks back, Sarah Kershaw wrote a piece in the New York Times that detailed this new phenomenon. Here’s how it works: Non-profit news organizations will solicit story ideas from the public and then investigate and report on what they find – as long as the story is of value to a local community or society at large, and those that request the coverage can pony up the cash for research and production.

According to Kershaw, San Francisco Bay area non-profit Spot Us is currently leading the crowdfunding charge. If you’ve got the dough, Spot Us will look into your story and report what it finds on its Website. If a major newspaper or broadcast outlet gets wind of the story and wants to run it, that outlet can do so free of charge – unless it wants exclusive rights.

Spot Us won’t be fully operational until the fall, but has already generated a great deal of interest in what it calls “community funded reporting.”

Of course, crowdfunding does raise issues as to what Kershaw calls “journalism being bought by the highest bidder.” This is most likely why another non-profit news organization, ProPublica, is also picking up the traditional media’s slack – but doing so with its own funding and its own mission.

ProPublica “is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” Paul Steiger, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, has raised $10 million to build a cadre of 24 reporters that will give their stories away to any news outlet that wants to run them.

The first ProPublica scoop came earlier this summer when it partnered with 60 Minutes to bring viewers the story of Al Hurrah – a U.S. taxpayer-supported TV network in the Middle East that drew criticism for, among other things, anti-Israeli reporting.

Whether funded by local communities or millionaires, investigative journalism is getting a controversial, but much-needed, boost from everyday Americans looking to right wrongs and set the record straight. The medium will never be the same.