When the Huffington Post announced it would crowdfund a one-year reporting fellowship to cover the aftermath of teenager Michael Brown's killing by a police officer in Ferguson MO, it incited a lot of sniping. In truth, the journalism world is divided on this issue. Some considered it a creative and harmless way to fund a worthy, and likely unprofitable, project. Others groused that it was unseemly for the multimillionaires who run HuffPo to solicit contributions from small donors. Still others fretted that if the effort was successful it might encourage media companies to start crowdfunding public--interest journalism they would previously have paid for themselves. Here, Adler examines the case for Huffington Post's crowdfunded reporting job.