Not long ago an article in net-funded journalism is born.

Joshua Ellis had an idea…an experiment. The Trinity test site in New Mexico was about to open to the public, the one of 2 times it does that a year, and he decided to journey there and write a 2,500 word essay about the experience. The only thing was, he didn’t had the funds for such a trip. So he asked people on the net to donate, via BitPass, the money necessary to make the trip and write the article.

His minimum goal was $500 and he reported soon after this post that he more than passed that goal.

A little while later — the “Dark Miracle” article was released into the web.

The teaser:

“Dark Miracle“
by Joshua Ellis

There’s an old story that in the hours before dawn on July 16th, 1945, a young woman named Georgia Green was being driven back to school at the University of New Mexico by her sister Margaret and her brother-in-law Joe. Suddenly, she saw a bright flash of light, and she gripped Joe’s arm hard enough to make him swerve the car. “What’s that light?” she asked.

The thing is, Georgia Green was blind.

At that moment, some fifty miles away, a tall, gaunt man in a porkpie hat was also staring at the light, through a pair of darkened welder’s glasses. He was the architect of Georgia Green’s dark miracle, and he was very, very tired — as tired, perhaps, as anyone can be and still move and breathe. It had been a long road coming out to this empty desert spot, which he called Trinity. It had been a long war.

Some of the men around him cheered. Some of them wept. A few, mostly scientists, were quietly sick in the sand beyond the dim lights of their camp. But he just stood and watched the great glowing mushroom cloud that rose in the darkness like a judgment from one angry god or another.

I am become Death, thought Robert Oppenheimer, remembering an ancient Hindu text. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

The rest can be read here.

The pictures here.

(via zenarchery)