Talk to a random sample of journalists and they’ll tell you the same thing - no one commissions investigative journalism any more.

Talk to any editor and they’ll tell you why; it costs a fortune to produce and rarely adds anything in terms of circulation or bottom line.

In an era of plummeting circulation and competition from free online news sources, as far as a cost-benefits analysis of newspaper investigations goes, it’s all cost and no benefit. Like if ITV1 decided to produce another series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, rather than another bullshit Ant and Dec multiple vehicle pile-up.

And so it’s perhaps not surprising that - obsessive disrupters that they are - various web entrepreneurs are trying to find an alternative business model for Woodward and Bernstein 2.0.

The latest of these ideas is ‘Spot Us‘ (as in, ‘hey buddy, spot me a Dollar’) - a Knight Foundation-backed experiment in crowd-sourcing donations to support investigative reporting.

The idea is as simple as it is clever as it is well intentioned as it is doomed to failure. Someone - a pressure group, most likely - posts a suggestion for a story to the site. “Hey, wouldn’t it be good if someone investigated whether Sarah Palin’s daughter is actually her granddaughter.” (Spoiler alert: no, she isn’t unless Palin-the-younger is stacking those things up like Russian dolls. Still, score one for abstinence education, Sarah.)

Journalists are then asked to pitch to investigate the story, with users of the site invited to contribute a small amount (say, $20) towards the cost of the reporting. It’s up to the journalist to say how much they estimate the story will costs to cover, and it’s ultimately up to the site’s editors to decide who gets paid to write what.

Once the report is complete - and passed through a final editorial filter by Spot Us - it’s released under a Creative Commons license for any news outlet to use. In other words, it’s the process that’s paid for, not the product.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it’s backed by a little over $300k of the Knight (as in Knight Ridder) Foundation’s money, Spot Us has attracted a fair amount of attention from Web 2.0 experts and media pundits on both sides of the Atlantic. Nic Brisbourne from Esprit has a good post here, and the New York Times has a relitively uncritical explainer here.

On the whole, these commentators seem to think it’s a good idea, so long as Spot Us can overcome the problem of bias. Which is like saying that flooding is a good idea, so long as nobody drowns.

The famous quote credited to Reuven Frank is appropriate here, albeit not quite in the way Frank meant it; “News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.”

By definition, Spot Us can only report stories that someone wants to be told. If the first rule of arguing is never to ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer, then it must also be the first reason why Spot Us’s attempt at impartiality is fundamentally flawed. Who is seriously going to propose or fund an investigation to which they don’t already know the conclusion?

And when the report is finally published, which serious news outlet will run or report it, without the disclaimer that it was funded by donations from interested parties, or without first putting it through their own investigative filter, thus defeating the object? For these reasons, most Spot Us stories will end up confined to blogs and talk radio. Those noted havens of impartiality and journalistic ethics.

But there’s an even bigger problem with the Spot Us model. In order to get the public to put up even a few Dollars, a story has to be juicy from day one. And that’s just not how investigative reporting works.

Anyone who has read All The President’s Men will know that it took a lot of legwork and chasing empty leads before Woodward and Bernstein had the first idea of what they were dealing with. And then even their rivals at other new outlets didn’t see the meat in the story until much later. Are Spot Us seriously suggesting that disinterested members of the public will be prepared to drop twenty times the cover price of a newspaper for something which may turn out to be nothing? Please.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘OK smart arse, what would you do to save investigative newspaper reporting?’

Well, hypothetical cynic, I’ll tell you.

I’d kill it. Take it out to the shed and put a bullet through its brain. Its been sick since the mid-80s and watching it try to struggle for twenty more years is embarrassing at best and cruel at worst.

Then I’d stop obsessing with the medium - a schoolboy error - and start looking at the message. And it’s at this point that I’d begin to smile. Because, outside of newspapers, investigative reporting is doing just fine, thank you.

I guarantee - absolutely guarantee - that you don’t know the names Woodward and Bernstein from their articles in the Washington Post. And yet you do know them. You know them from Woodward and Bernstein’s book, All The President’s Men, or from William Goldman’s film adaptation of the same name.

Likewise, you know about what really goes on in the American fast food industry from Fast Food Nation, and about the post-9/11 Bush administration from Woodward’s trilogy on the subject, and about firearms and healthcare in America from Michael Moore. Walk in to any bookshop and go to the politics, culture, biography or current affairs section. Now tell me investigative reporting is dead.

Of course these are the big stories - what of the smaller, more immediate ones? TV news. It’s there first, it has money and access and it has a 24 hour cycle to fill, meaning that every lead gets followed and reported no matter how apparently inconsequential. And through that idiotic thoroughness, and the relentless competition between networks, a story - a gradual truth of sorts - is built. Certainly enough of a truth to trigger people in power to take action and start asking questions of their own, which is what did for Nixon in the end.

Online news sources have their part to play too, although, frankly, they can be divided into two camps - brand extension for established media companies or total horseshit. Blogs have a role - but it’s confined to fact checking and uninformed gadflyery. What was it the Joker said? If you’re good at something, you should never do it for free.

Newspapers though have no part in this Venn Diagram, lacking both the thoroughness and longevity of books and the immediacy of television. Newspapers are good for crosswords, cartoons and columnists - and that’s it. Come on Bessie, out to the shed with you. Click. Neigh. Bang.

No. If Web 2.0 geniuses are really looking for the future of investigative journalism, I’d suggest they look towards books.

Books are one of the few printed non fiction products where the cover price actually exceeds unit cost. They’re increasingly cheap to print and distribute and they are much better suited to the kind of long-form writing that newspaper readers can’t abide. And, if paid by a major publishing house, book advances are usually more than good enough for a decent investigative work.

If I were these geniuses (which, by the way is the title of my second album), I’d approach an established publishing house with a business plan - a new imprint that publishes short (40,000 words maybe), low cover price (£4.99 tops) books, each written by a recognised investigative reporter and each dealing with a single investigative subject.

I’d sell these books on a subscription. £50 a year for 12 books - one a month. And I’d also sell them singly online. I might possibly - but not necessarily - print the non-subscriber copies on demand, or offer them as ebooks. I’d certainly have someone on the team whose job it was to pitch film and syndication rights to other media. You only need one Erin Brockovich.

I’d give each author twelve months to write the book - minimum - on the basis that it should be the definitive book on the subject, like All The President’s Men or Hell’s Angels. But while they were working, I’d encourage these authors to post extracts of their research - and previews of their findings - online. That way, the fact-checking and lead-generating power of the blogosphere can be used to its full potential, hopefully avoiding too many embarrassing after-the-fact-checks.

And finally, once the book is out, I’d create a media-rich site to support it. Audio clips from interviews, a photo gallery (at £4.99 the books won’t justify a colour plate section in print), a fact-checking and correction area and a blog by the author to provide updates and to respond to questions from readers.All of this, by the way, would also be linked back to one big mothership of a site to support the imprint. This would be the home to subscription and stockist info, a blog by the imprint’s editor and a place to discuss the series as a whole.

Putting my reader’s hat on for a second, at £50 a year, I’d  definitely subscribe - and I’d really enjoy the excitement of not knowing each month what I was going to learn. It might interest me, it might not. But I’ve wasted a fiver on less worthwhile things, and there’s always re-gifting or Book Crossing.

And that’s it. That’s how I’d disrupt investigative journalism for a Web 2.0 world.

But, then again, given my history of success in the publishing industry, what do I know?

Only this - someone with a sense of humour should definitely go undercover in a newsroom to find out whether investigative reporting is really dead.

And because I’m all about lame physics puns, on principle, they should do it at the Observer.

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