@1 There are two main sources of capital for journalists - government or companies that buy ads. The problem is when they can put pressure to not write of unjust acts that may conflict with their interests. The solution is to provide founding from large enough group of people when there is no dominant subgroup. Models has to be highly distributed to avoid bribing users[1]. There needs to be upper limit of funding e.g. 99$ or 10%[2] to dilute influence of a single user. Even better for a 5$ a month I can get credit which I can allocate.
@2 Log everything. Brutal transparency. That's the only way I can think of.
So you're going to make something people want, right? :) I want to be able to vote what is important for me. I want to post an issue and let other judge if it's worth investigating.
[1] I'm amazed how often pattern of distributed models occurs and works very well (Bitcoin, Git etc.). [2] That may have a similar effect as Twitter's 140 chars limit