Eat My Shorts – This week the tagline I use for this standing Friday feature – to do great writing read great writing – is slightly misleading because some of the great writing I came across I didn’t read, I listened to. I’m referring to a segment on last week’s edition of PRI’s This American Life radio program. “Eat My Shorts,” co-produced with ProPublica calls into question the excuse heard a lot on Wall Street and in government hearings that nobody saw the financial meltdown coming. The piece does so by examining the actions of a hedge fund named Magnetar that figured out how to game the system – and made a mint doing it.

TAL fans will recall that Alex Blumberg, one of the investigative reporters on the project, also worked on the show’s now famous May 2008 segment, The Giant Pool of Money, which NYU recently called one of the top 10 journalism projects of the past decade. This 40-minute program is riveting, as fine a piece of explanatory journalism as you’ll get. It’s also a great example of how dramatic, influential, and dare I say even sexy, good business journalism can be.

ProPublica and the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes – Speaking of ProPublica, the five-year-old nonprofit investigative news agency walked away with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink took the award for her story Deadly Choices at Memorial, on life-and-death decisions made by doctors at one hospital during Hurrican Katrina. Fink won the honor in conjunction with the New York Times Magazine, which ran her piece.

ProPublica’s win marks the first time a nonprofit news organization has won a Pulitzer, recognized as the highest honor in U.S. journalism. It’s a big step for the New York-based outfit, and for the dozens of other nonprofit news organizations like it that are forming all over the country. Look for those organizations to use this a rallying cry for assistance, both from experienced journalists they hope will come to work for them as well as donations they hope to attract.

Read the entire list of 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners here.

But not everybody’s pessimistic about the future of the news business. In fact, there are quite a few optimists who believe the trauma hitting the industry will lead to new business models and opportunities for those editors, reporters and other workers who keep up with the changes.

Here’s just a sample of what commentators are saying about the transformation that’s now taking place, and why it could be a good thing:

Why we should feel bullish for the future of journalism – DigiDave, aka Dave Cohn, wrote this meditation on the future of the news biz from an airport lobby on little sleep. Put aside his youthful enthusiasm – and the f bomb he throws in for effect – and he makes an interesting point about experimenting with business models. Try enough, he says, and some will stick. Cohn doesn’t just talk the talk. With the grant money he won in a Knight News Challenge last year, he’s helped start Spot.us, a marketplace for news where readers can write in to request stories they’d like to see written and donate money toward making it happen.

For other business models, look at FieldReport.com, which is paying thousands of dollars for personal essays, or investigative news Websites such as ProPublica, Environmental Health News and BailoutSleuth, which are being funded by philanthropists or foundations – a throwback to the days when newspapers were owned by wealthy captains of industry.

The market and the Internet don’t care if you make money – News organizations can’t live by the same assumptions they always held about their business, says new media analyst Scott Karp, on Publishing 2.0. The market doesn’t care about traffic or eyeballs, it cares about networks, something Google, Facebook and YouTube have already figured out.

Why it’s a great time to get into journalism – To those who risk much will come great rewards, says social media expert Paul Gillin, who blogs at NewspaperDeathWatch. In this post from October, Gillin recounts the story of one enthusiastic college student who parlayed a summer intership with a major daily newspaper into a paid blogging/reporting gig there.

The organization is ProPublica, a privately-funded public-interest news Website that opened for business earlier this summer.

ProPublica aims to provide readers with the type of hard-hitting investigative reporting that’s most commonly associated with big-city dailies. So far the site is achieving this by mixing stories produced by its own 27-person investigative staff with links to the best public-service journalism being produced elsewhere.

ProPublica’s lofty goals aren’t the only thing setting it apart from other online-only news operations. The New York City organization has hired a who’s who of nationally ranked editors and reporters, starting with Editor in Chief Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, former managing editor of The Oregonian and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is managing editor. Two of the most recent additions are Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, investigative reporters who won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 for their coverage of deaths at the city’s King-Drew Medical Center. Read about other reporters who’ve recently joined the staff in this story from Editor & Publisher, and in ProPublica’s own staff page.

Another thing that sets ProPublica apart: money. The non-profit is totally funded by philanthropic contributions from The Sandler Foundation, started by the former owners of Golden West Financial Corp., a savings and loan, and other organizations. Read more about how Herb and Marion Sandler got into the public-interest news business in this New York Times Magazine article on them from March 2008.

Such deep pocketed-connections will allow ProPublica to pursue its goal of running “the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States” without having to worry about the two things that haunt newspaper editors and publishers these days, advertising and circulation. In that respect, the organization sounds a lot like National Public Radio, another ad-free news enterprise known for its ace reporting from around the globe. Whether ProPublica can duplicate NPR’s success remains to be seen – but I for one will be rooting for them.