From AP via nytimes.com (posted March 29):

The Huffington Post said Sunday that it would bankroll a group of investigative journalists and make the nation’s economy an initial priority for coverage.

The Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to create the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, with an initial budget of $1.75 million.

That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate coverage with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

The Huffington Post Web site is a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news. It has seven staff reporters.

Ms. Huffington said she and the donors were concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time when the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely. She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists.

NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen partly wrote the following on his PressThink blog on Monday:

The full press release is here. I will have a role:

Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, will serve as a senior advisor to the project. Rosen, as a director of NewAssignment.Net, his research project at NYU, previously collaborated with The Huffington Post on OffTheBus — an experiment in citizen journalism that drew 12,000 contributors and gained widespread media attention for its coverage of the 2008 campaign.

Said Rosen: “In addition to collaborating on OffTheBus, I’ve been writing for years about this possibility – distributed reporting projects that efficiently coordinate the efforts of volunteers, data-combing efforts that are open source, as well as teams of pros and amateurs working together — and I think The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is the next logical step.”

It is important to stress that the new Investigative Fund is separate from the Huffington Post as both a legal entity and an editorial producer. It is a new non-profit, and so the announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the operating principle is: “report once, run anywhere” because work the Fund produces will be available for any publication or Web site to publish at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post. (Probably through a Creative Commons license, but this has not been decided.)

Much about how the fund will operate has yet to be determined, but mostly what the money is for is to pay journalists and the costs of investigations. Some of those journalists will work for the fund as staff editors, some will be contracted for as freelancers on a story-by-story basis. Some of the money will, I hope, be used for innovative projects that move in an open source or pro-am direction. That is one of the reasons I am joining up, to advise on that portion. I also think the Fund is an important and public-spirited thing to do; I want to see it come out right, and to gain more resources than it has at the moment.