Lisa Hrabluk has entered the Launch36 accelerator with a noble purpose: she wants to help freelance journalists find meaningful work with corporations, government and not-for-profit organizations.

Hrabluk has begun a company called Wicked Ideas, which is one of the six or seven companies accepted into the second cohort of Launch36, the accelerator organized by PropelICT of Moncton. Propel Executive Director Trevor MacAusland said his group will not immediately reveal the names of the entrepreneurs in this cohort, but he did say there’s representation from the three Maritime Provinces, fulfilling the aim of establishing a regional program.

Hrabluk is perfectly happy to come forward to discuss her idea – which she admits identifies the problem more clearly than it proposes a solution. The problem is that freelance journalists possess a set of skills that could prove valuable to large businesses and organizations but too rarely are contracted to do that work.

It’s important to note that she’s not focusing on connecting journalists with newspapers or other publications. Hrabluk understands that journalists are superb at researching a subject, analysing what they learn and writing reports on it. Businesses, government departments, and non-profits all need such talent but too rarely link up with the right people to do it.

So Hrabluk has dedicated herself to forming a company that can perform such a task.

“I’m at the very beginning and I’m looking at the value proposition,” she said in an interview. “It’s something we journalist look at as journalists. I think we have to figure out a way to blend in with the crowd.”

Hrabluk, a former columnist with the Telegraph Journal in Saint John, said she hopes to be introduced to new perspectives and ideas by going through the accelerator. She wants to move beyond discussing the problem with reporters to come up with a solution that she can develop into a business.

She is thinking about a sort of crowdsourcing solution, which would serve as a sort of online market in which various organizations can post jobs that journalists would bid for. But the key for success would have to be a system linking ideal projects with ideal candidates, not simply a product in which low price was the most important factor.

Each member of Launch36 is assigned a principal mentor, and Hrabluk’s is David Baxter, the chairman of Launch36 and Vice-President of Innovation at T4G.

The accelerator held its first “fireside chat” – meetings with experts in entrepreneurship and technology – last week in Moncton. It will move to Halifax on Wednesday for a workshop with Ash Maurya, a Texas-based expert in lean entrepreneurship and the author of Running Lean.