This is an awesome experiment that any semi-serious journalist should take a closer look at. Gothamist wants to get in on the long-form feature thing, and will pay one journalist $5,000 to write a piece landing somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 words.

We’ll cover the editing and production and then publish the piece to the various eBook singles platforms (Kindle, Apple, etc.) with a reasonable price: $1 to $3. Then we’ll handle advertising the piece on our NYC site. If this experiment makes a profit, we’ll share them with the writer once we’ve recouped our initial costs. Will this work? We’re not sure—but we want to find out.

I love it. The concept isn’t exactly new, new ventures such as Byliner are already dabbling in it in an organized fashion, but it is awesome nonetheless.