Open Channel is a new blog from msnbc.com and NBC News, for and about investigative reporting. We hope you'll share your story ideas, documents and comments.

Open Channel serves several roles. It's a place to:

• Gather the investigative reporting by the staff at msnbc.com and NBC News. The principal contributors are NBC News correspondents Michael Isikoff and Lisa Myers, producers Rich Gardella and Amna Nawaz, and reporter Bill Dedman of msnbc.com. Projects editor Mike Brunker of msnbc.com is a player-coach on the team. We also expect to have contributions from many others on our news staffs.
• Point you to investigative work by other news organizations and the growing group of nonprofit and university groups devoted to investigative reporting. Every day we'll post a round-up of investigative work on the Web.
• Share with you our work in progress, to seek your input. You may have a document or know of a source who could help with a story we're working on. Sometimes we won't be able to divulge what story is in the works, lest we alert the competition, but there are times when we will be able to call out for your contributions. And after publication or broadcast of an investigative report, we can be more transparent about the choices we've made. Open Channel gives us a place to share updates on continuing stories.

And something new:

• Hear your suggestions for investigative ideas.

Here's a little secret: Although most news organizations ask for story ideas, most good ideas submitted by readers and viewers get ignored. That's inevitable. There will never be enough reporters with time to pursue every story. 

 What we usually do is to select the very few best ideas -- yours or ours -- and pursue those, often through a painstaking search for public records and sources to substantiate and tell the story. That's pretty straightforward.

The silly ideas get discarded. Same with the vague ones ("Investigate the banks!" "Investigate Dick Cheney!"), which are more topics than story ideas. And we discard those that we've read or seen somewhere already. That's pretty easy.

But what about the rest? There's a middle group of story ideas that seem substantial, that come with enough information to start checking them out, but that don't quite make it into that first group, the cream of the crop. Maybe the story is too narrow -- it's about something happening only in Kansas City or Kuala Lumpur, or involves only a small company or a single public official. News organizations have never known what to do with these ideas. They sit in our inboxes, wasted.

Here's our plan: We’ll tell you about them. We're going to post reader ideas, an edited summary of an idea submitted through our online form. Other readers can add their information. The people contributing those ideas have accomplished some of their goal -- they've gotten the word out to a wider audience. And we're hoping that contributions from more readers and viewers will flesh out the idea, like a Polaroid picture coming into focus.

What sort of ideas are we looking for?

We're about investigative reporting on topics that matter: corruption or conflicts of interest, broken systems and lax enforcement, abuses by institutions and individuals with power. Holding accountable those who possess power in the world, whether that's national government, state or local government, nonprofits, or the press itself.

What is investigative reporting? That's not an easy question to answer. Certainly, the tools of the investigative reporter are applied in all good journalism. The investigative reporter's work often is distinguished by subject matter (serious subjects, often hidden ones) and by the tools employed (especially time, public records and insiders willing to share their knowledge).

It may be easier to define what investigative reporting is not: It's not a press release. It's not a group seeking publicity for its campaign. It's not reporting in support of a company's stock price or a politician's reputation or a party's ideology.

We know what politicians and institutions are saying. There's plenty of that. But what are they doing? That's where we need more reporting.

Thanks for joining us at Open Channel. We're eager to hear from you.

Bill Dedman, moderator