Recently Steve Katz, who works for Mother Jones, and I have been having an interesting conversation about Spot.Us, nonprofit journalism, and other topics via our blogs.
I met Steve in 2007 at a Personal Democracy Forum conference and he has been a fantastic resource for brain picking. Now that our conversation has turned to the web it is an open brain picking session. Kudos to Steve for starting it up.
The recap
Steve: A Fundraising Question about Spot.Us
“the question, I think, is whether and how folks will shift their loyalty from the project to the organization (there’s a second question, too, which is whether this deeper level of donor loyalty matters for Spot.us-like organizations – maybe I’ll have to go have a conversation with Dave about this, huh?”
Steve: Coming up: A Conversation with Dave Cohn
This was the start of the more formal conversation between Steve and I. He laid out some questions about our approach and status.
My response to Steve: I thought I’d have fun and do it as a video.
Keywords are “transparency, immediacy, and control” (for the donor, that is).
I also ask Steve questions about whether or not Spot.Us is being naive or if we can learn a thing or two from how Mother Jones does its fundraising.
Steve’s Response to my video:
“So it’s not donor choice per se where Spot.us is innovating.
As Dave notes, it’s the possibility that interested community members connect with reporters on stories and issues they care about. Not only does that increase the possibility that people will actually pay for stuff they want, but it makes the reporting process more transparent (this was what made Chris Albritton’s Back-to-Iraq.com so damned exciting back then).”
And now for my response.
Steve actually brought something to light for me. I often say that “donating to journalism isn’t new – it is just having control over where your money goes that makes Spot.Us interesting.” In fact, I use NPR as an example all the time. They could blow me out of the water tomorrow by adding transparency to where donations go (and I would be totally fine if NPR did adopt community funded reporting).
Steve points out that what community funded reporting represents isn’t just participation through donating, it brings a new level of transparency to journalism.
Increasingly Spot.Us does reporter debriefs either mid-way or at the end of an article. We use BlogTalkRadio right now and we invite donors to get on the phone and chat with the reporter about what they are learning and digging up. There is an added service in here. The community in “community funded reporting” can get involved and as Steve notes the reporting is more transparent and accountable.
People often say that reporting for an ethnic newspaper is much more difficult than a large metro because the reporter is part of the community they are reporting on. They are more accountable. I’d say the same goes for a community funded reporter. In fact, I’ve been told as much. One reporter even printed out the list of donors and tacked it to their bulletin board as a reminder that he was responsible to a list of engaged citizens. The big step Spot.Us is taking, according to Steve, isn’t one of giving donors transparency, but it’s to make the reporting more transparent.
That sounds beautiful in a blog post, but as noted (and Steve conquers) it might be part of the reason why it hard to get other news organizations to adopt the Spot.Us model. They must be ready to put themselves out there in the open from day one. I have a million reasons why its a good idea to be transparent – but I’ll save my “pitch” for another blog post.
Let’s table that – but keep it in the back of our minds, because I’ll come back to it: “It’s hard to get news organizations to jump on board because of a cultural shift.”
Steve and I also discuss traffic. I still try and avoid traffic as a measure of success. But Steve is right in pointing out that it isn’t just a metric of success, it also measures impact. Impact is something that donors want. A good example: A recent Spot.Us story we did with AllVoices has a nice “number of views” metric. I can see that as of writing this blog post the video has received almost 5,000 views. That is a boon to donors. They want to know that the story they support is seen by others. When Spot.Us did a story with the Oakland Tribune, fundraising was easier because people knew the editorial would be tight and that the finished story would get distribution.
Raising traffic, however, is a beast in itself. One I don’t want to get locked into. Growing traffic can be self-defeating and from my Digg days I know how ugly and distracting it can be. I want to focus on making good journalism happen.
That’s why Spot.Us is also a platform that is designed to engage with partnering news organizations like Mother Jones, Center for Investigative Reporting, San Francisco Chronicle and others (The new Pocantico Watchdogs have me salivating).
In truth this goes back to Jeff Jarvis‘ saying: “do what you do best and link to the rest.” It goes for covering topics on the web but I also think it needs to be applied in how we run Spot.Us.
What we do best:
- Create tools for fundraising of journalism projects via Community Funded reporting.
- Do our own outreach on behalf of journalism projects.
- Create a sense of community around journalism projects and expose the sausage making to those who are interested.
What news organizations do best:
- The editorial for journalism projects
- The distribution of journalism projects
- Spread word within their own communities about how to get engaged.
I think some startups try to recreate the entire media sphere. That’s a mistake – one that Spot.Us has been cornered into from time to time (and will probably happen again) whenever we don’t have a partnering organization to share the load. Hence the irony of the situation above: What we do best requires a cultural shift and that’s why it is slow to find partnering news organizations when actually partnering with us is as quick as clicking a button.
Steve suggests another hire, somebody who can manage our relationships with other news organizations. I wouldn’t be against another hire at all 😉 but we probably won’t for budgetary reasons.
Instead I want to build out the platform so that these partnerships can be more lightweight. Right now it is confusing for news organizations to know all the different ways they can partner with us. Increasingly that is a part of the biz/dev plan that we are working on that I think will be crucial.
It still goes back to the question: Are we a news organization or a platform?
I think we have to be a bit of both without falling into the trap described earlier of trying to recreate the entire media sphere. So what parts of Spot.Us are a news organization and what parts are a platform serving news organizations as a main customer?
That is something we are still figuring out. It is where we start to look a bit more like a nonprofit mediabistro. A community for reporters and news organizations to meet and work together – but they are doing so in public and that way we can bring community funding into the mix.
As for Steve’s advice on traditional fundraising: A spaghetti dinner is on the way. We don’t have all the details yet but folks who donated to the City Budget Watchdog pitch are invited to a meetup on July 13th at the Grotto where we will talk about the reporting we’ve done so far and what is to come next. Afterward we will meander to 21st amendment (details to come). And if you want to come but haven’t donated…. 😉
And now – back to Steve: In my first response I asked if there was something naive about the Spot.us model. It seems that it isn’t naive – just a little “out there” still.
But Mother Jones as an organization is already somewhat “out there.” You have been pushing the boundaries of running a nonprofit news organization for some time. Politics aside – nobody can knock what you have all accomplished.
But “when life is hard you have to change.” And times are tough. Even the NY Times is re-thinking itself. So my question is: How does Mother Jones, a much larger organization than Spot.Us, approach all this? Are there plans being plotted? Moves being considered? Are things pushing on as usual? What is on your radar that I’m not aware about?
2 thoughts on “Conversation with Steve Katz, Part four.”