An interview with David Cohn as he begins his Fellowship year.
By Alecia Swasy
News organizations could once rely on car dealers and department stores for ad dollars to support the newsroom.
When freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw decided to pursue a story on a growing garbage pile floating in the Pacific Ocean 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii, she knew she would need some cash to pay for the trek. She turned to Spot.Us, a website started by journalist David Cohn. The site posts story pitches and invites readers to pick their favorite ideas and pledge contributions to fund the work.
For their money, sponsors got a rich dispatch from Hoshaw, which was published in the New York Times: "Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas."
News organizations could once rely on car dealers and department stores for plenty of ad dollars to support the newsroom. But those sources have dried up in rocky economic times. Now organizations are experimenting with all sorts of pay models, such as asking readers and corporate sponsors to pay for stories. Cohn believes there's enough support out there to take Spot.Us nationwide. It's the focus of his year as one of the 2010-11 Donald W. Reynolds Fellows at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
"We're trying to pioneer community-funded reporting," Cohn says. "This is a way of distributing the cost of hiring a reporter. If 50 people give 10 dollars each, it's enough for a reporter to go out and do a story." Another method of raising funds to cover story research is to get corporate sponsors to foot the bill. For instance, say 100 people take an advertiser's survey. Each one gets rewarded for taking the survey by getting to direct their survey fee to the story of their choice. "Freelancing is an antiquated system," Cohn says. Now they can play an active role in coverage.
Cohn, who has a master's degree in new media from Columbia University, started the website with local stories around the San Francisco area, then expanded to Los Angeles and Seattle. Recently, he has started adding story pitches from other parts of the country. "I've had pitches come in to me, but I've had to say no because of growing pains," he says. "It's time to open it up."
Cohn believes in total transparency, especially with advertising. Readers will know who's sponsoring the site and can avoid ones they don’t want to support. "It's not like a banner ad. It's an opt-in advertisement." Ideally, Spot.Us will have enough advertisers where readers can decide which advertisers get to pick who is the sponsor. "Let's say its BP and Save the Children," Cohn says. "We'll assume Save the Children wins. It makes it much more valuable to them because they got voted in. That increases the value of the sponsorship."
He likens it to Facebook. "People are opting in and freely giving up information because they get something out of it."
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