Crowd Funding & Sourcing

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

There are many things that excite me about Spot.Us. One in particular, which I believe is part of our pathway to sustainability is "community-focused sponsorship" (CFS). It is the main thrust of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. My evolving view of advertising is becoming a passionate topic.

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

Publish Insight Network, from American Public Media, will be eight years old this January. In web terminology - that makes it ancient. Before Twitter, before "crowdsourcing" was a word, before "the year of the blog" and more.

So what is it, how is it still relevant and where will it go?

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

I often say that if I were born 30 years earlier the arc of my career would have been drastically different. At 28 I would hopefully have graduated from a cub reporting beat, maybe covering the cops, to some other topic. My aim would be to win awards for my organization with the hope of becoming middle or upper management.

Brian Steffens, Director of Communications

Internet, TV dominate youth tech time

Washington Post moves into crowd sourcing

2/3 get news from traditional media, but 1/2 see no future

New Economist channel targets elites, attracts ads

Newspaper, TV station team up for Seattle ad network

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

When Spot.Us first launched the idea of community funded reporting was relatively new. While I can't say we "invented" the practice, I do believe Spot.Us has played a pioneering role.

Two years since our launch, I'm taking stock. It's funny how some things change and some things stay the same. Take for example this interview I did with "Have Money Will Vlog" founders. Even before Spot.Us there were examples of community-funded reporting. What we wanted to do was create a platform so that others would have the tools to quickly and easily launch their own community-funded reporting projects.

Brian Steffens, Director of Communications

Belo shows excerpts, drive readers to print for rest

When sharing, don't forget email

NBC gets more aggressive in local programming

iPad users willing to pay for (some) content

Advertising is up, except for news (but it's better than it was)

Joy Mayer, 2010-2011 Fellow

I'm lucky enough to be spending eight months learning from the best about what it means for journalists to engage with their communities. I'm getting interesting and varied answers. For some folks, engagement is about listening to the community. For others, it's more to do with inspiring civic activism and involvement. And sometimes it really comes down to brand loyalty and page views.

Where does the responsibility for audience engagement fall within a news organization? Part of my mission is to make sure working journalists get to benefit from the information and tips I'm gathering, and I'm thinking about who I should target with my evangelism.

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

It was around August of 2008. Spot.Us had not launched but we were actively and publicly building our site. Meanwhile a startup out of Israel,  IAmNews.com, was taking the center stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and even won the “People’s Choice Award” out of the demo-pit.

I was doomed.

There was IAmNews.com with their already launched sleek fun design. Then there was Reporterist, which already had the editor of the Oakland Tribune praising the idea on their website via a sweet video. Meanwhile I was mapping 10 or so other sites that grazed, overlapped or downright plopped right on top of the Spot.Us idea I had swimming in my brain.

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

Profits are killing journalism.

Publishers and editors care more about the bottom line than the quality of their reporting.  Newsrooms are shrinking, as a result, and good stories have gone untold.  The public is worse off because of it.

So goes one argument, at least, in the debate about public funding of journalism.  It’s a hot topic that appears immune to any clear-cut solution, and it’s shaking the foundation of what it means to do journalism and the best way to do it.  Among the big questions are:

Should public funding expand to cover the gaps left by the shrinking private news business? Could it expand without government support, and would this create conflicts? Would a heavily subsidized public media serve us better than the private media?  If so, how?

With a sponsorship from Free Press, we asked the Spot.Us community to tell us what they thought.  Then, we invited the 407 users who took the survey to decide where the sponsorship dollars would go, which is to say, we handed over a part of our budget to them, in return for their two cents.

SURVEY RESULTS

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

In the last few weeks there has been some interesting and exciting news in the journalism-startup world. I wanted to take some time to highlight new players and provide my own personal analysis.

Collaborative Storytelling - Three New Startups

Kommons.com

Kommons was founded by the young Cody Brown who busted into the conversation with some epic blog posts last fall. Cody and his co-founder taught themselves how to code (this is a bootstrapped operation) and iterated like mad. For that, my hat is off. Disclaimer: I've had the chance to chat with Cody a few times and find him to be a brilliant media thinker in part because he has no baggage from past experiences.

Similar to 10questions.com, Kommons is playing in a very interesting intellectual space. The ability to reach people in high positions of power has dropped to a Tweet. The ability to get a response from them has not. More accurately - the cost to merit their attention. This can be done, however, if enough people chime in as well. Since the collective cost of asking powerful people the same question has dropped to getting the attention of the masses, in theory, the most important questions will rise to the top and the public conversation will become richer.

David Cohn, 2010-2011 Fellow

Anyone that has followed Spot.Us from the beginning knows we've tried to remain iterative and agile. In the earlier stages of Spot.Us I thought this was one of the larger lessons for journalism-entrepreneurs. I went through the iterative and agile process and tried to document it so others could repeat.