We at Beacon (beaconreader.com) agree.

We've focused on this for the past 18 months and have helped journalists and publishers get more than $1m in funding for quality journalism projects.

I wrote about this as well a while back: http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-relations...

Hit me up if you wanna chat: adrian at beaconreader.com