Josh Marshall, the proprietor of the leftish political blog Talking Points Memo, is launching an interesting experiment — he’s trying to see if he can raise enough money directly from his readers to fund covering the last 10 days before the New Hampshire Democratic primary, without having to depend on an external sponsor:

Now, the normal way to do this would be for me to go to one of the publications I write for, get them to pick up the tab (hotel room, transportation, etc.), and write it up for them.

But that would mean saving most of the reporting for some magazine or website or newspaper and not doing much or any of it for TPM. And, frankly, I think blog coverage is much better suited to covering something like the New Hampshire primary than magazines or newspapers. Because itâ??s really about moment-to-moment reports, running commentary, and a lot of other stuff that doesnâ??t easily fit into the rubrics of conventional journalism. Besides, you want to know whatâ??s happening while itâ??s happening, not in a lazy summing-up a week after the votes have been counted.

It’ll be interesting to see if he can pull it off — there’s definitely a case to be made for patronage as a model for how to fund microjournalism, but as far as I know nobody’s tried it on any really significant scale.