That's right, niche journalism. Could be called research. Perhaps a community of people could ask questions and they could contribute a certain amount of fund

That's right, niche journalism. Could be called research. Perhaps a community of people could ask questions and they could contribute a certain amount of funds to the answer. When the amount of money people are willing to pay for the answer gets to the right amount, then a journalist "adopts" the question and finds the answer. The community who wants the answer could evaluate the truthiness of the article/research and the article writer could gain credibility. Perhaps they could even leave the article up and people in the future could pay to see what was written. It's not unlike the situation now with custom web development. Hackers are paid to write code. These journalists would be paid to write articles. Similarly, lots of problems the Hacker will solve require research and analysis becore the problem can be solved effectively. Seems like a marketplace problem.