Spot.Us and WitnessLA.com have launched a very cool new partnership we call The LA Justice Report.

The idea is to fund and investigate local social justice stories that we believe are far too important to be allowed to go unexamined.

Our first story is called Follow the Gang Money: How is LA Using Our $25 Million?

Our second series is called Dangerous Jails: A six-month investigation in which a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department whistleblower reveals to the LA Justice Report that groups of rogue deputies have flourished for years inside the nation’s largest jail system while the LASD command staff looked the other way.

THE PARTNERS

Spot.Us launched in 2008, the brainchild of digital media wunderkind David Cohn. It is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change” funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation, and it partners with the Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

Cohn’s idea was to pioneer “community powered reporting.” Roughly translated that means that, through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.

The first Spot.Us network opened in the Bay Area and drew a committed following of community members willing to fund local news coverage that was being otherwise vaporized in the ongoing media meltdown. Average people donated toward stories they cared about in increments of $20, $30 and $50.

More recently, Spot.Us has brought its model to LA, headed by second generation journalist/editor Anh Do, who has worked as vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S., the Dallas Morning News, the Seattle Times, and the Orange County Register for 12 years. (For Anh’s full bio go here.) Spot.Us has has now launched a Seattle network as well.

As most of you know, WitnessLA started in March of 2007 with a grant from the Justice and Journalism Fund—our intention to cover the social justice issues in Los Angeles that were increasingly being overlooked or ignored as the traditional news business moved ever deeper into crisis.

In the three years between then and now, we’ve broken some stories that no one else was covering, and tried to bring context and a human face to social justice issues where ever we found them. In the process, we’ve drawn a wide array of readers and gotten a couple of nice awards for our efforts.

Given our individual purposes, a joint effort between Spot.Us and WitnessLA that would merge our strengths in the social justice arena seemed to be a no-brainer.

Hence The LA Justice Report.

THE CONCEPT

The way it will work is that, using their community donation model, LA Spot.us will raise the funds for investigative reporting projects that will be overseen and published by WitnessLA, with input from Spot.Us. In the next few weeks we intend to add a third partner in the form of a Spanish language media outlet to widen the reach of the stories we will be telling.

FOLLOW THE GANG MONEY: HOW IS LA USING OUR $26 MILLION? — was the LA JUSTICE REPORT’s first investigation.

DANGEROUS JAILS is the second.

THE TEAM

MATTHEW FLEISCHER

Matt Fleischer is the team’s first investigative reporter. He is also a veteran LA-based journalist and editor who has been a staff writer with the LA Weekly and senior editor of the LA City Beat. He is currently a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, editor for Fishbowl LA, and he writes for several other outlets both print and online. Matt has been honored by the Association for Alternative Newsweeklies and by the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) for his story “Navahoax.” His story “Children of the Revolutionary” was honored by the The LA Press Club and First Amendment Funding Inc. Matt is a recipient of a Village Voice Media Fellowship. AND he/we won 2nd place award from the LA Press Club for Advocacy Journalism for the “Follow the Gang Money” series. Part 2 of the same series, written by Matt, won 3rd place in the Press Club’s Online Investigative category. Matt would also like you to know that when he is not writing he wanders, usually by foot.

CRAIG GAINES

Craig Gaines copy-edited the first LA Justice Report. Craig is a freelance copy editor and writer in Los Angeles. He perfects copy for magazines, book publishers, Web sites, nonprofits, and other entities. Gaines also edits for Slake: Los Angeles and manages social media for the quarterly.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

You can help fund The Justice Report in one of two ways:

1. There’s the obvious: If one of the stories we list seems important to you, you can donate a few bucks. (TO DO SO CLICK HERE.) The idea is for a lot of people to put in just a little.

2. Every so often, you can donate at no $$$ cost to you by earning credits when you answering a couple of questions from a Spot.Us sponsor. We’ll let you know when one of those opportunities arises.

NOTE: We’re fully funded for our first story. A new story up soon for funding.

OUR FIRST STORY!!!

Here’s the rundown on our first investigation..

All three parts of our prize-winning first series, Follow the Gang Money, funded by you and people like you, may be found here and here and here

SERIES NUMBER 2: DANGEROUS JAILS

Now we’re launching our second investigation, DANGEROUS JAILS.

Read Part 1 of the series here.