January Carnival of Journalism – How to support journalism online financially

This months Carnival of Journalism is hosted by Paul Bradshaw. He writes:

Well, lets get my obvious bias out of the way. As the founder of Spot.Us – I think the idea of “community funded reporting” has a lot of merit and I’ll go into more detail why in this post. I do want to preface it by saying: it is not the only model out there. This is not the “key” to journalism’s financial woes – but I have yet to be discouraged and convinced to turn around and give up.

The gift economy in America is $300 billion of which 75 percent ($225 billion) comes from individual donors. So while Spot.Us had a great first month raising almost $5,000 – I don’t believe we’ve even scratched the surface.

More importantly, Spot.Us is one representation of an idea — “community funded reporting” — which should be MUCH bigger than our small nonprofit. There are other examples of it already in ReelChanges.org and Representative Journalism* but there are COUNTLESS individual examples of ‘community funded reporting’ from Talking Points Memo and Ana Marie Cox all the way down to when a blogger on a specific topic puts up a paypal button.  (Soon I’ll release the code under an open source license and people can create their own community funded sites).

The realities: Advertising dollars are still needed – so I’m glad that the LA Times has reached a new level of sustainability. Spot.Us and “community funded reporting” cannot sustain an entire newsroom or an individual’s entire freelancing career. Nor will you ever hear me claim otherwise.

But community funded reporting can help fill in news holes – and as we close secondary papers and shrink newsrooms – there will be big news holes, especially when it comes to larger, expensive investigations that typically require more funding than they will produce in advertising.

I am finding out more and more every day that certain types of investigations the public will fund and others, they won’t. There must be a public good presented. In short: We can fund stories on education, police, poverty, but we won’t be able to crowdfund that profile of a celebrity. Lucky for publishers – that is the kind of content advertising can support.

What needs to happen for “community funded reporting” to take off?

First it is a question of marketing: The public has to know that this is a meaningful way to donate, just as they donate to goodwill, and journalists have to learn to sell their work as a public good.

Larger publishers must experience and say “this reporting needs your support.” They have the audience and the trust – and that is why I made sure that Spot.Us integrates very nicely with any news organizations should they want to participate. But in truth, they can do this without Spot.Us.

Larger bloggers should experiment. What Anna Marie Cox did is a great example of “community funded reporting.” I often use Robert Scoble as an example of where “community funded reporting” couldn’t go wrong. Scoble has a niche within tech and already has a sponsor, but imagine (just for sake of argument) it fell through, just as Radar Magazine fell through for Anna Marie.

Scoble could easily propose to do an investigation into something tech-specific like (again just for fun) Sun Microsystems (it would have to be within his tech niche) and could probably be funded overnight. If Scoble wanted to raise 5k – that whould just be 500 people giving $10 each. That is just 1 percent of his 50k followers on twitter. According to the 1% 9% 80% rule from Wikipedia (which is holding true on Spot.Us) it is very possible.

Now that might only last Scoble a month, but I bet he could do that 4-6 months of the year. The other 6-8 months he might have to find something else, but I never claimed Spot.Us was a career maker. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

I use Scoble as an example because it is easier to imagine with his magnitude of followers. But I believe anyone with 50k readers that is an expert on a specific niche could do the same. SFist? Oakland Tribune? Michael Pollan covering food? LaughingSquid could spread the word about something he is passionate about? If the pitch was right (obviously an important factor) I feel confident they could all fundraise an in-depth investigation of their choice. And those are just off the top of my head here in SF. Think nonprofit news for a moment (Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, ChiTown and… gasp, ProPublica, and you start to get a sense of what is possible).

But I digress…. “How to support
journalism online financially”

There is always the possibility that…. it isn’t.

Journalism has been financially sustainable in the past because it held a monopoly on the means of mass communication. There is no monopoly anymore. Perhaps as a result, it is no longer sustainable. End of story.

But guess what… Art (high art) has never been sustainable in the true sense of the word – but it has always been around and nobody is questioning its future (pop art, pop journalism etc is a separate issue). Spot.Us is built around the idea that journalism, like the arts, is no longer sustainable in the true sense of the word, through advertising – but can go nonprofit and serve the public and therefore merit public patronage.

I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps journalism is still sustainable via an updated advertising model on the web. And if I am – I would be happy. If I am wrong I believe it will be because of a mixture of tools that in combination keep a news operation alive. That combination being advertising, subscriptions and syndication. I suspect other members of the Carnival discussed this in more depth than myself.

Community funded reporting is one angle which I am bias towards and I had to get my peace out. The real answer: we don’t know. I think there will be lots of splintering and every news organization will have to figure this question out for themselves. There are no more cookie cutter business models.

*disclaimer ReelChanges.org is my fiscal sponsor as a nonprofit and I’m an advisor on RepJ).