I know very little about crowdfunding. But recently, I discovered Spot Us, a site that’s actually doing journalism under an alternative funding model.
The idea is that users post story ideas, reporters sign up to write those stories and suggest how much it would cost them to do so, and then readers donate until they’ve fully funded the writing of a story, at which point the reporter goes out and does the work. It strikes me as particularly piecemeal, but I’m really compelled by the way it inherently involves readers in story selection.