I’m noticing a new sort of news site: Supported by philanthropy and reader contributions and focused on a relatively tight niche.

One example would be the venture forthcoming from Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, who will build a team to cover algorithms and “the impact of technology on society.”

Another might be The Trace, focused on gun violence in the U.S.

Then there’s The Appeal, which is zoomed in on local prosecutors across the country.

One obvious benefit of this model is that it can be very attractive to donors, from major individual givers to grant committees to readers and grassroots activists. They get a clearer sense of what they are supporting than they might with a broader news organization. As reader and philanthropic support  becomes more central to the sustainability of journalism, this clarity becomes much more important. At the same time, as advertising revenue falls away, raw scale (pageviews, unique visitors), which has tended to mitigate against journalistic focus, becomes less important.

Another benefit of the microjournalism model is that the community of readers, tipsters, commenters, and social media posters that forms around the site might tend to be more impassioned.

The downside, I’d imagine, might be a lower bound on the size of that community. Of course, a niche site that succeeds can always broaden; Angwin and Larson, for their part, have clearly scoped out a meaty topic beyond algorithms, for example, and envision, as Angwin put it, “a substantial newsroom that aims to publish daily.”

There is, of course, an old microjournalism, but it was and remains commercial — the trades, who cover any conceivable topic where a critical mass of advertisers can be found. At one point during the dot-com downturn of the early aughts, a coworker and I at a tech magazine joked that we’d end up at one of two competing publications we had discovered covering the practice of raising meat goats.

The trades have been notoriously captured by advertisers. By making it easier to raise funds from, solicit information from, and publish to a small community, the internet may have enabled a journalism that is more adversarial than the trades and blessed with more resources and investigative power than the first wave of individual independent bloggers.