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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

Investigative journalism? There is definitely an opportunity for a site that allows such reporting.

Who would pay for it? We've already seen that people aren't willing to pay for quality journalism, so we're left with advertisers? Who obviously don't want their own products being investigated.

Perhaps though if somehow you could get companies to pay for investigations into their competitors? Like an anti-advertising model? I presume this would end up a zero-sum game though, and companies would opt to not play at all.

Or just fund it like Xuhua Zhou did, with short-selling. Maybe some combination of these, banding together with the Consumer's Union and other interest groups.

Short selling is necessary and good as a stopgap measure, but there's at least one good reason we shouldn't want it to be a go-to reward strategy. Most investments have a bounded worst-case loss. You can only lose as much money as you put into it. Short selling, however, is backwards; you have a strictly bounded best-case profit and the theoretical maximum loss is infinite.

If you know the time frame you expect the market moving news to come out you can go short with limited downside by buying put options. You also get more leverage that way.

How do you get more leverage? Aren't the put options another expense?

Who would pay for it?

That's the whole point: No one. I care enough about some subjects that I would work on it for an entire year if it meant enough people would read it.

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