As public-generated news content continues to flourish online a lot has been said recently about the future of journalism. This is understandable given the closure of many newspapers worldwide.
An interesting not-for-profit venture called Spot.Us offers a new perspective and hope for journalists everywhere. Basically this is crowd-funded reporting where the reading public gets directly involved in supporting news that’s relevant to them. For example, imagine that 50 people want to expose a particular issue. They each contribute say $15 or $20 to hire a journalist to investigate the issue and develop a report on their behalf. The stories can come from citizens who flag issues they’d like to see investigated or from journalists who might say “Here’s my story idea, is anyone interested in helping me develop this?”
The story is pitched via the Spot.Us website which acts as a marketplace where people can meet to determine what stories should be developed. The site provides a list of stories and funding updates so interested parties can get on board. Once sufficient funding has been raised and the project approved, the journalist outlines the deliverables that contributors can expect for their money. Donors stay involved through regular investigation updates.
The amount that any individual or organisation can contribute is limited to avoid the possibility of pushing a particular agenda. Stories must be developed in response to a community saying “this is an important issue for us that we’d like to see investigated”.
As the content is commissioned by the public it is owned by the public so it can be given away via a creative commons licence to any publisher to re-use. The exception is that if a news organisation wants first publishing rights then the original donors are re-funded in full and the story is on-sold.
So this is yet another example of control being handed back to the people. It should provide hope to journos everywhere that, now more than ever, they are a conduit to sharing stories that people actually want to read and hear about.
In talking about the death of newspapers Nicolas Carlson of Business Insider recently supported the thought that journalism won’t go away.
He contends that news reporting was and is about finding sources. Naturally those sources want to go to the biggest megaphone they can find to spread their news. To me all that’s really changing is who holds that megaphone these days.
