Radar magazine has folded for the third time, this time apparently for good (although the website has been sold to AMI, which publishes The National Enquirer, and will become a competitor to TMZ and other celebrity sites). Among others, this has stranded Web journalism legend Ana Marie Cox, who was reporting on the U.S. election campaign for the magazine, so she is asking readers to support her directly in a bid to continue writing until the election is over (she still writes a blog for Time magazine as well).

Cox, who was the founding editor of Gawker’s Wonkette blog before moving to Time magazine — and has also written for Mother Jones magazine, as well as for Feed magazine and the godfather of all snarky blogs, Suck.com — has set up a tiered approach to reporting that gives her sponsors a chance to participate in her reporting to some extent. It includes:

* Over $10: A personal thank-you email
* Over $50: A personal thank-you phone call
* Over $100: My instant message screen name, regular personal updates via email and/or instant messages on election night
* Over $250: I will ask a senior McCain adviser the question of your choosing and send you the MP3 audio of the exchange
* Over $500: Phone call from McCain headquarters on election night
* Over $1000: One-on-one post-election dinner debrief

There are some pretty interesting dynamics involved there. What if Ana Marie gets a ton of people signing up for $100? She could have sore fingers on election night. What if she gets a bunch of $250 sponsors? That could make for some interesting questions, and potentially something newsworthy from the McCain campaign. And if she gets a pile of $1000 sponsors, then she’s going to have a busy social schedule :-)

Is this the future of political reporting? I doubt it. But it’s still an interesting experiment — similar to what several writers did during the beginning of the Iraq war — and I wish her the best of luck.

Update:

As he mentions in a comment below, Josh Benton — the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab — interviewed Ana over email about her fund-raising plans. She apparently has $2,500 raised already, with the bulk of it coming in $10 increments, and has added some features to the sponsorship program, including the right to name her seat on the campaign plane.

Update 2:

Ana says that the Washington Independent — a political reporting site set up by the non-profit Center for Independent Media earlier this year — has agreed to co-sponsor her reporting.

I’ve been meaning to mention this before, but Jay Rosen, the brains behind NewAssignment.net and its various spinoffs — including OffTheBus, the citizen-journalism political reporting venture with Huffington Post — has a new project that he told me about when we met for a drink while he was in Toronto for the Online News Association conference (he told the conference about it too).

In a nutshell, Jay’s idea is this: take social-media tools such as blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking and so on, and use them to help “beat” reporters at newspapers improve their coverage of that beat, by allowing sources to contribute their knowledge in a variety of ways. As Jay describes it:

“Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.”

I think this is a great idea, and I hope Jay finds enough reporters (and newspapers) who want to participate. He says he has 7 or 8 of the 12 he is looking for already signed up. As I said to Jay when we met in Toronto, my only reservations are that some sources may not want it known that they are sources, and reporters may not be comfortable opening up about how they do what they do.

That said, I think it will be a fascinating experiment in Journalism 2.0, just as Assignment Zero (the joint research project between NewAssignment and Wired magazine) was.

This is fascinating: from BoingBoing.net via Sean Bonner comes a link to a blog in Islamabad that has been reporting live on the capture of a radical Islamic leader who tried to escape — disguised as a female relative of some young women — after the bloody siege of a mosque:

Update: 2:40

1. 600+ Students (male and female) came out of jameya and surrendered. Parents are outside Lal masjid in a huge number and are not willing to give 20-24 years of their upbringing in hands of the admin of lal Masjid. 2. Ghazi brothers are thought to be fled away from the Lal masjid – They cannot be contacted; neither any students who have come out could give an indication of their presence inside. Their families can’t be seen in as well, including Um e Hasan (Principal of Jameya and Wife of Ghazi Abdur Rasheed). 3. Deadline extended to 3 PM – relaxation given to have maximum number of students out from the Lal Masjid, before the REAL OPERATION.

3:00

1. 750+ Students come out and surrenders.
2. Dr. Amir Liaquat resigns (??)

3:15

APC’s are in action again; Media asked to get away as far as possible from the site. Deadline is extended till 4 PM. The Ghazi Brothers may be inside premises of lal masjid.