Dallas Mavericks’ owner and Internet and TV mogul Mark Cuban is building a new Web site to report on stock fraud and corporate wrongdoing, reports the San Jose Mercury News. The site, he promises, will be much more interesting and lively than traditional reporting and will span the globe to deal with transnational corporations that fly under the radar of most locally-focused newspapers.

The troubling thing about all this is that Cuban sees trading on the information before it’s published as the major profit center for the new site. The paper quotes his blog: “It will be fully disclosed and explained. This site is for the profit of its owners and we will buy and sell stocks that are discussed, before they are made available on the site … If we can uncover companies whose stock is public and that can be bought or sold and that allows us to pay for more in depth research and effort. I’m good with that.”

And there’s nothing illegal about this so long as the reporting doesn’t slip over into insider trading. It is not at all clear how information from confidential sources would not slip into insider trading if a reporter or Cuban’s Web site were to trade on it before it were published. In fact, the site will have to create a wall between publicly available information, which isn’t widely recognized and confidential information that reporters may discover but would never legally be able to trade on.

Still, it can’t hurt to have more eyes trying to keep everyone on the straight and narrow.