Even in this age of bankrupt newspapers and atrophied newsrooms, giving away fully formed news stories for free is not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, it involves a shrewd sense of timing. Paul Steiger learned this lesson through trial and error over the past 18 months as he established ProPublica, a unique model for nonprofit public-service journalism, in which proper investigative stories about "abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest" are offered free to whoever wants to print them.

It is, in effect, an investigative news outlet of 32 journalists without an actual outlet, save for a basic website, and already it has made it to the front page of just about every major U.S. newspaper and seen major journalistic successes, such as a recent expose about California's nursing regulator failing to revoke the licences of nurses who stole drugs from patients.

Mr. Steiger, who was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal when its offices were damaged on 9/11 and when reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Islamists, is no naive rookie.

He knew he had to offer his scoops exclusively, at least on the first day, before they are made widely available under a "creative commons" contract, which means they can be republished but not resold.

But even this act of journalistic charity has its pitfalls.

As he explained in an interview this week before a Toronto speaking engagement, one major problem comes down to the difference between television and print news.

Both will want to put their own finishing touches on a story, whether by making a few more phone calls or doing an on-camera interview with their own reporter or anchor.

Speaking to an audience full of prominent journalists at a lecture hosted by Samara Canada, a charity devoted to public service that conducts exit interviews of former MPs, Mr. Steiger cited USA Today as an example of this dynamic. He had brought the paper a story about bad candidates hired to the U.S. air marshals program, including sex tourists and one who tried to hire a hitman called the Crucifixer, but they were concerned about making it fit with USA Today's style.

Mr. Steiger invented a new word to describe his flexibility on this question: He urged USA Today's editors to "idiosynchronize" the story as much as they liked. He would retain a veto if the story were to be distorted, but for anything that was not absolutely crucial, he was not fussy about the presentation or the style.

The problematic difference between television and print, however, is that if you take an incomplete story proposal to a major newspaper, the odds are it touches on someone's beat, and that someone is likely to claim they were working on a similar story, and to resent the meddling of an outside group such as ProPublica.

But, on the other hand, if you take a fully formed investigation to a television news outlet, which is unlikely to use beats, they will complain they have lost the opportunity to do the big interview with their own host.

The solution is to have a guy such as Mr. Steiger around to manage the approach. Dapper in silver Sigmund Freud cufflinks made by his wife, he is a veteran journalist who retired from the top of one of the world's top news operations to pursue his vision of public service, and who knows that most investigative stories end up as "roadkill" due to lack of follow-up -- investigative reporters want to move on, beat reporters have other duties, and other newspapers, as a rule, would sooner run blank pages than give credit to a competitor.

Mr. Steiger laughs at that skepticism, which also hurts his efforts to spread his stories around.

He jokes that some of his potential partner newspapers tend to think, "We can't use that story, we don't know where it's been." But he is savvy enough to add: "If you have to worry that The Washington Post might take it, then it provides a certain leverage to us."

Of course, the US$10-million annual funding pledge is also important, and limits ProPublica's viability as a cure for journalism's sickness.

That money, donated by the Sandler family of California, provides for the 32 journalists who work out of a former stock brokerage in Lower Manhattan, and it seemed so exciting to the Toronto audience that John Fraser, Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, captured the mood with his question, half in jest, about how the Sandlers could be nudged north of the border.

"It's amazing the number of people who have invited the Sandlers to visit," Mr. Steiger replied. "But it is extremely difficult to get into their kitchen."

With US$800-million or so in their foundation, and a minimal staff, the Sandlers are serious philanthropists, and ProPublica is "the smallest bet they have," Mr. Steiger said.

There is a common argument -- an obstacle to ProPublica's politically neutral aspirations -- that the operation is by design anti-business and pro-union, a reflection of the Sandlers' traditionally left-leaning projects.

But Mr. Steiger said he has been promised his independence, and that the first two years have "pretty well wiped [that] away as a millstone to hang around our neck."

"I thought it would have taken a year longer," he said.

He joked that, at The Wall Street Journal, he worked for bosses who were just as far right as the Sandlers are left, with such success that the paper's news and editorial sections were known as "two papers for the price of one."

To follow the metaphor, ProPublica is no newspapers for the price of US$10-million a year, and that is the brutal truth of the matter: that it is a success of philanthropy, not free-market journalism.

For a Canadian comparison, one might look to The Walrus magazine, a luxury product of high quality and low circulation, an intellectual charity. But its small scale seems to push back against the prospect of the Dominion of Canada following the U.S. lead toward ProPublicanism. There is simply not enough money around.

In the United States, journalism is arguably in a worse financial state than in Canada, which makes Pro-Publica all the more valuable.

Last year, David Swensen, the chief investment officer of Yale University, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, arguing that: "Only a handful of foundations and wealthy individuals have the money required to endow, and thereby preserve, our nation's premier news-gathering organizations. Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance."

Mr. Steiger talks hopefully about breaking the philanthropical yoke, of becoming truly and fiscally independent, but he describes the possibility of 25% non-Sandler funding as a "stretch goal" and 10% as more realistic in the near term.

If charity is the future of journalism, the economy has some work to do.