When it decides which digital-news projects to fund each years as part of its News Challenge, the Knight Foundation makes one funding criterion clear: a winning project “has to be open source, scalable and replicable.”

Today, Spot.Us—the experiment in community-funded reporting, and a 2008 Knight grantee—expands from its initial location in California’s Bay Area to Los Angeles. Thus: scalable and replicable.

One interesting element of the expansion is that it isn’t, in fact, merely an expansion. Rather, Spot.us’s move to LA is introducing a collaboration between the still-fledgling news organization and USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism—a partnership that seems to make particular sense in light of the fact that journalism education is doing much better, right now, than the industry at large.

We, like many other media watchers, will be following the collaboration with interest. In the meantime: more on the move, from Spot.us founder Dave Cohn, here.