Mark Cuban, billionaire and owner of the NBA franchise in Dallas, announced that he is “starting a website that focuses on uncovering corporate crime.” He continues, outlining the business model for the site: “I have every intention of trading on the information uncover[ed], and disclosing exactly what i do. The ultimate transparency.”

Another of Cuban’s ventures, HDNet, the first all high-definition TV network, is “talking to Dan Rather and we hope to do a deal where he produces a show that uncovers news. Information with a payoff.” Perhaps some of the news Rather uncovers will be of interest to the Cuban corporate corruption site.

Cuban defends his decision to trade on the corruption and crime information: “You may not like that I will trade on information we uncover and then publish it. I think reporting what we find is better than not reporting it. If we can uncover fraud. Thats a good thing. That profiting on the information we find is the smart thing to do. It beats the hell out of trying to remake the site every year to maximize advertising or subscriptions. It changes the newsenomics, which need to be changed.”

One conceptual difficulty I see is that for Cuban to “trade on” the information he gets, he’ll already have to own shares of stock in the pany. Indeed, to trade on the news seems to mean that he’ll only be selling. That is, unless the news he breaks is in some cases about the lack of corporate crime in a case where it is suspected…then he could buy, I suppose.

In any case, Cuban’s plan certainly takes the idea of investment research to a whole new level.

Updated Update: Chris Roush gives an overview of Cuban’s plans as well as the site name, , and links to a reaction from former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss.

TCS Daily writer Larry E. Ribstein, a law professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, writes about the Cuban plan and confirms that “presumably this means that he will sell ‘short’ the stocks the journal investigates, and then buy them after the revelations puncture the price.”