A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona by my friend and mentor Dan Gillmor. It was a gathering of journalism professors from around the country who are going to build their own curriculum to teach entrepreneurial journalism. Dan asked me and Mark Luckie to come speak about our experience going from J-school to startup. It’s a different career path from many and the point is to show professors that it’s a viable path.

Without a doubt it is a real path. I’ve been living it for so long (even before Spot.Us I had been working on “experimental projects”) it doesn’t even seem like a question to me. Sometimes I am looked at as a poster-boy for entrepreneurial journalism. And on those occasions I’m happy to evangelize what is a totally viable path.

But one of the professors at the Cronkite J-school gathering asked a very important and a totally fair question. I’m paraphrasing here: “I know it’s a real path, but it can’t be all butterfly’s and kittens. What are the tradeoffs? What are the hard parts of going down this route? I don’t want to send off students without a healthy dose of reality.”

Sometimes those of us who have drank the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid like to point out success stories and perks without mentioning just what you have to give up to go this route.

I wouldn’t change a thing about the career path I’ve chosen. It has absolutely worked out for me. But if I were to advise a younger me – I would be remiss in my egoistic duties if I didn’t convey both sides of the question “should you go out on a different kind of career path.” There are plenty of positive things I would say. I often shout out about how awesome it is to start your own project, blog, company, nonprofit, etc. But that’s not the purpose of THIS blog post. I’m playing the contrarian so that our Carnival isn’t one big “yes we can”-fest. With that in mind there are THREE big areas that somebody who is thinking of going out on this path should keep in mind.

1. There is a time burden

I used to joke “that the Internet doesn’t sleep and so neither can I.” I’ve gained some wisdom on how to balance certain aspects of work/life but if you have gone out on your own to start something up it is not a 9-5 job. It is not a Monday-Friday job. “What you gain in freedom, you lose in free time.”

2. There is a mental burden

The buck stops with you. There is no “boss” to complain about. If things have taken a turn for the worse, the only person you can blame is yourself. In fact, as other people start to rely on you for a paycheck it becomes an even bigger mental burden. You don’t want to let anybody down. You must learn to live with that mental pressure. What you gain in potential reward you lose in mental security.

3. There is a path burden

It is a career path. Once you start walking down that road, it is difficult to go back. When I made the choice to go down this path I was a hard working tech-reporter. I have followed some of my tech-reporting peers and admired their careers. In fact, my replacement at Wired is still there holding down a solid job. It is a path I could have gone. If I wanted I could still go back to being a reporter/writer – but after several years being out of that game, I’d have to do some backtracking. I’d have to work underneath that guy at Wired (ironically enough, I interviewed/hired him). I’d have to sharpen my skills again. It is difficult to go back. Moreover – you might not want to go back. There is a bit of the “take the blue pill or the red pill” aspect to striking it out on your own.

As you probably picked up – there is an upside to all of these downsides. As with most things in life it isn’t black/white. There are shades of grey and you have to be prepared to paint with those shades. It’s amazing what you can do with only a few colors.

(image credit)

Spot.Us launched in November of 2008. Counting the months of planning (and applying for the Knight News Challenge) that went into the launch and I’ve been working on Spot.Us for almost four years. In that time we’ve pushed boundaries, had many successes and shortcomings which I’ve tried to share along the way. As I’ve always said – Spot.Us will never be perfect. It will never be “done” and that as long as we can strive for something we are making progress.

Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the Public Insight Network. There is a lot to suss out with this merger but when you sit and think about it the merger makes a lot of sense. Here’s the official press release.

The Public Insight Network (part of American Public Media) was co-founded by my friend Michael Skoler, now at Public Radio International. It’s a software platform (similar to Spot.Us) that has long been at the forefront of how Public Media can interact with and take cues from the public by giving them a means to inform journalism. Individuals can provide insight to make stories more informed, insightful and reflect the community in a truer sense. Spot.Us is built on a relationship with the public giving them a kind of editorial control and influence over what stories should be done. Both create a media that is more responsive and responsible to the public’s needs according to their own volition. Combined we offer both opportunities to readers, creating a more nuanced relationship between a news entity that uses PIN/Spot and the public.

Creating and managing a more nuanced relationship – that’s what “public media” should do. I hope that as Spot.Us and PIN merge we can continue to push the boundaries in transparency and participation in the process of journalism so that media organizations can better serve the public.

All of this is under the backdrop of my gig at UC Berkeley’s J-school which is a blast. Spot.Us is my baby, but just as it is time for it to grow up and move out of the house, it was time for me to tackle new problems. Through this merger both are happening.

I will continue working at Berkeley’s J-school and I will remain the founder and a part of the Spot.Us team moving forward. But it is high time for Spot.Us to grow wings and move beyond what any small team can accomplish. I believe under the PIN leadership of Joaquin Alvarado Spot.Us can grow to accomplish much more and I intend to be there as we reach for higher goals and aspirations.

There will be much to write about in the coming months (years). I’m happy to say that Spot.Us is able to fund itself as a project for the first year of this merger and if revenue grows, could do so indefinitely. But for the moment I want to keep this post short and sweet. Spot.Us will continue. For the moment it will be status quo. There will be changes moving forward but we will remain an open platform that will fundraise for independent journalists and news organizations.

And to close it off – an excerpt from the first IdeaLab post I ever wrote about Spot.Us.

As I see it – community funded reporting is low-hanging fruit. The Knight News Challenge is all about doing research and development – the kind that isn’t done elsewhere in the industry.

Now, it may turn out that this low-hanging fruit is poisonous. But aren’t you glad that somebody is at least going to give it a good honest bite to find out? More importantly – aren’t you glad it’s somebody who shares the values of the news industry? Fact is, this idea is going to be a learning process. My goal isn’t to solve the business woes of journalism. I don’t think anybody can do that. But I do intend to taste the fruit of community funded reporting and report back as clearly as possible how it tastes. Fact is, this idea is going to be tried by somebody. My fear, however, is that those who get to it first successfully don’t have journalism’s best interest in mind – but the bottom line.

I’m happy to report back that the fruit isn’t poisonous. In fact, I think it’s time we begin to harvest at a larger scale.

(Image Credit: Jules Brelaz)

I’ve always been a big fan of failure. I think journalism should hold a “fail camp” (inspired by Ethan Zuckerman). When I re-started the blog carnival I dedicated a month towards failure. I’m working on a new project (details to come soon, promise) and I think/hope failure will be a big part of it.

We talk a lot about barriers to success. But we also say that we can only succeed on the shoulders of our many failures. Therefore I’d like to point out what I think are the barriers to failure (and therefore also to success). If we don’t fail early and fail often we won’t push forward. So below are some barriers to failure. Luckily most of these are easily overcome if you can identify them.

1. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

The “What If’s” are a terrible thing. It assumes that every bad scenario you can think of needs to be handled right away before you even start. This is the opposite of the sage philosophy from “Getting Real”: It’s not a problem until it’s a problem. I put this barrier first because it’s a particularly poignant problem in the journalism community. We are natural skeptics. Our instinct is to think about who might be secretly benefiting, who is maliciously stealing public money what ‘problem’ is there underneath the surface. That’s great in reporting but the WRONG attitude to starting something new. The “What If’s” are unproductive. Deal with “this is” when it happens. I am very familiar with “what ifs” because I get them every time I explain Spot.Us to a journalist that has never heard of the concept.

What if stories get influenced by a donor?

• Concerned journalist: What if a neo-Nazi wants to fund a story? OH MY GOD David – HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO JOURNALISM?
• Answer: Well, we limit how much a person can donate, so you need a group of people.
• Concerned journalist: Well, what if a GROUP of neo-Nazis want to fund a story?
• Answer: umm… well, you need a reporter who puts their professional reputation on the line doing that story.
• Concerned journalist: Well, what if the reporter is a Nazi? Jesus David, didn’t you think about that!
• Answer if I have energy: If there is a group of neo-Nazis and a reporter, they don’t need my site to do the story they want to do.
• Answer to stop the obvious ‘what if‘ cycle of the conversation: You’re right. I should shut down the site before that happens.

Bottom line: If the reason you aren’t doing something starts with “what if” – it’s a bad reason not to move forward and perhaps fail. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

2. Tradition!!!! (sung loudly while swinging your hands in the air)

Traditions are great. But if presented with a new way to do something which breaks tradition – you should take it. Traditions are only as strong as their tests. If you never test a tradition, it’s weak, fragile and hasn’t evolved. If you test the tradition against a new method and the new method fails, score for tradition (waves hands, sings loudly), but if not – you must learn to adapt. The old tradition of war was that it was fought in an open field in straight lines of volleyed musket fire wearing bright uniforms that looked like targets. That “tradition” didn’t stand the test of time for a reason. Do you really want to defend the online version of volley-musket fire because it’s “tradition.”

3. Letting the perfect be an enemy of the good.

Dreams of perfection should not stall the launch of something good. If it were perfect you wouldn’t fail early or often. You wouldn’t fail at all. But one could also argue if you were aiming for perfection, you’d end up attempting nothing. At a certain point you have to accept what is and isn’t possible in a reasonable timeline and aim for what is reasonable. The good news is that you don’t have to END there. You are just starting there. In some respects I think that’s the reason so many folks let perfection become the enemy of the good. They are concerned that they’ll never progress after an initial effort. Hence, we won’t start unless we know we can get all the way. This is a great way to invest months into a project that could fall flat its face. Remember: It’s cheaper and easier to try something than it is to debate about whether or not to try something.

4. Fear… of failure. 

It’s a perfectly natural fear. Nobody wants to have their ego bruised. Luckily we are living in a time where the web is figuring itself out. There is a way to fail gracefully, to fail towards success. It’s not even altruistic, if you fail you’ll learn more and will be more likely to succeed in a future endeavor. You can fail selfishly and get kudos along the way. Remember kids, only you can defeat fear of failure.

5. Institutional momentum

This is a bit different from “tradition” above (#2). In this case it isn’t for lack of will that new things are tried and potentially failed. In this instance it’s for lack of an institutional way. In other words – there are no resources (time, money, knowledge), to get started on a project even though everyone earnestly wants to try it. The good news, any institution that has this problem of existing momentum also has some resource,s it’s just a matter of allocation. This is the classic newspaper problem. Why don’t news organizations stop the presses and invest in digital? Because print is still where they make their money. You can’t cut off the head to save the body.

But here’s the truth. If there is a will, there is a way. Fact is, if you accept that perfection is not the enemy of the good and that you don’t need to accommodate every “what if” scenario, you can create a streamlined alpha of many projects. You can do this independent of the institution. And institutions need to learn to let go, allow some 20% time, skunkworks or whatever you want to call it. You just need a wee-little bit of space. The smudgiest of resources to begin. From there – you’ll get a better sense of whether or not something is worth more resources.

6. Resources to get started

There is good, fast and cheap. You get to pick two.  Keep your scope small and remain flexible. Google does have a lot of resources and yet innovation happens outside of their Google-plex. It’s possible. You just have to be ready to make sacrifices. The good news is that you can always come back to fix things. Later will always happen – now is fleeting. Take advantage of now so that in the future, you can continue to push forward.

7. Leadership vacuum

If you don’t have good leadership you won’t launch new products. Leadership needs to be clear, so that everyone can get in line. Leadership needs to have a vision, to communicate that vision and know how to navigate the above barriers. If not, they themselves are a barrier. In truth, leadership is a post in and of itself, but certainly a leadership vacuum is a great barrier to failure. While that last sentence may seem counter-intuitive (great leadership should lead to success) consider Teddy Roosevelt’s quote: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Carpe Perscribo (Seize the writing/journalism)

The best explanation can be found in the video below which also has the instructions on how the Carnival of Journalism will continue as I pass the reigns to other hosts. For those that prefer text, keep on reading (but you’ll miss all the jokes I inserted into the video).

When: May 5th at 12pm PST.

Where: Publish on your blog

What: A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility. But this will be a safe space to discuss our failings and what we can learn from them.

The Details

We talk about ‘failure’ a lot in the online journalism community. It can be a bit of a buzzword. “Let’s fail early and fail often” is a motto I personally have adopted.

But the true value of failing is if we can share the lessons learned. We probably do this all the time without knowing it – but rather than try to condense our lessons into 140 characters, let’s create a safe space this month to discuss a failure that others can learn from.

Three rules

1. It must be a project you worked on. Let’s not turn this into a space to point fingers and lay blame on anyone but ourselves.
2. It must be your failing within that project (see above)
3. No apologizing. This is a safe space to discuss failure. In fact, I want there to be a fight at the end for the biggest failure of the lot. That person should be cheered for their honesty, insights and perhaps attempting something that none of us had the cojones to try.

This month’s Carnival of Journalism is in part inspired by Ethan Zuckerman who once discussed “Fail Camp” with me as a great platform to share lessons.

Look, none of us are perfect. Nobody expects everything we do to turn into Pulitzer investigations or multi-billion revenue streams. Everyone fails a little every day and occasionally we fail really big. The question is if we can fail well. One way to accomplish this, I believe, is if we share the failure, get it off our chest and help others avoid it in the future.

So with that – please join me for the Carnival of Fail, the failfest, failapalooza, all you need is fail. #jfail. Have fun with it.

Future Carnival of Journalism Hosts

Hopefully by now we all have a sense of how the Carnival of Journalism works. There is a host. Their job is to come up with an interesting topic and a date everyone will publish on their personal blogs. Everyone sends a link of their post to the host and the host then does a summary of what everyone said and tries to find next month’s host. Along the way – bloggers meet new bloggers, ideas are shared and the community of bloggers feels strengthened and empowered.

I’ve hosted the first four months to get things going.

But this is not a company. There is no ownership. It lives and dies if people take stewardship of it.

So email me: david AT spot DOT us if you want to host next month and let me know what topic you’d like to propose to the group. If you aren’t chosen – have no fear, you can email next month’s host with the same topic. Then both myself and the next host will choose the third month’s host. Following that the three ex-hosters will pick the fourth host. And so on and so forth until we’ve come full circle to 12 hosts.

If that happens…. well. Wow. That would really be a testament to everyone involved and how committed you are to discussing the future of media. We will then wipe the slate clean and start again with a new host. I’ll gladly do a Mardi Gras video #mardiGrasOfJournalism post.

I look forward to this and future Carnvial’s and I want to thank everyone for their time and energy. This has been a truly exciting endeavor and one that I hope continues well into the future.

From the launch of Spot.Us, I’ve always said the following:

• Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It’s just about being transparent and giving up control over how donation money gets spent.
• This model would have more success at the national or international level.
• This model would have more success if a known brand took the lead. (Again, I always tend to cite NPR.)

There has been much opining about the New York Times pay wall that went up this week. I was quoted in a Neiman Lab post on the topic; I wrote about it for the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where I’m currently a fellow; and I was a guest on WNPR, an NPR station in Connecticut, to discuss the topic with other news professionals.

Here’s one thing that I previously haven’t said publicly: Whether or not they know it, and without identifying it as such, the New York Times has taken a big step towards the NPR model. And that puts them just a stone’s throw away from the Spot.Us model. In some respects, I actually think they are closer and more likely to pull it off than NPR.

Subscription Plan Isn’t About Access

Let’s start by calling a “duck” what it is. The “pay wall” is not a “wall.” It’s incredibly porous. A savvy reader can find a dozen ways around it, from finding a Tweet of the story you’re interested in to removing part of the Times’ URL. In other words, the subscription plan is not about access. People that think the fee is about access are the same folks who think they have to pay AOL for Internet access in order to keep their AOL email address. Savvy readers will know it isn’t about “access” but rather something else. For starters, it benefits the print subscribers, who pay less for digital access than all-digital subscribers. Fair enough.

But I am willing to bet a LOT of people will pay for a “subscription” not for access and not because it comes with their print subscription, but for something else.

Donation Driven Journalism

If there is one thing that Press+ has taught us (aside from the fact that really rich folks can hype up a technology product and sell it off for millions of dollars) it’s that, yes, people will pay for news even if access to is never truly restricted. That’s a limited audience/market, but it exists. Interestingly enough, the price point doesn’t matter as much as one would think. That audience will pay $5 if you ask, and they’ll pay $15 if you set that as the benchmark.

National Public Radio has known about this small market for a LONG time. I could have told you this within 10 minutes of launching Spot.Us. But at least today we can see it as more of a given for the conversation. There is an audience that will pay for content. It’s small, and not a replacement for advertising, but it’s there.

The NYTimes.com subscription plans are not enough to sustain the entire organization, but it is a new revenue stream that didn’t exist before. You can call it a “pay wall” or a “metered wall” but, again, I think we should call a duck a duck. This is a donation system, plain and simple. News organizations don’t want to refer to “metered walls” as “donations,” and I understand why. I’m happy to stroke their hair as they cry into their ink-stained hands. We can call it whatever they want, but it’s a donation because there is no HARD reason for anyone to pay it other than because they want to or are too uninformed about how to get around it.

A Modest Proposal

Assuming the New York Times doesn’t want its future tied to the technical ignorance of the masses the way AOL currently does with its dial-up customers, the next question is: What can the Times give to its new donors? As Dave Winer and Steve Outing have both said:

“Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?” (Dave Winer)

Tote bags? Bumper stickers? Membership to a wine of the month club (with wine reviews from the Times sent along with every bottle)?

These incentives are necessary because the Times needs to find other ways to keep a paying customer on board. Where one month somebody might pay, the next they’ll slap their face and say, “Why am I doing this? It’s certainly not for access.”

These tote bag gifts mimic NPR fundraising. But let’s think even further. What could be an incentive that would increase transparency and participation in journalism and not cost the NYT organization infrastructure costs (ie: purchasing and shipping thousands of tote bags)?

Imagine if along with every $15 monthly “metered access” payment a NYTimes.com reader also got five NYT Points. After three months they’ve accumulated 15 NYT Points. Those points can then be used to vote on topics, areas of coverage, or redeemed for the tote bag mentioned above (an excellent plan B).

Again, NPR could do this tomorrow, except — believe it or not — NPR is a bureaucratic nightmare when it comes to how donations are handled. Remember, each NPR station is unique and the mothership NPR, aside from being caught in a culture war, is not allowed to fundraise from individuals the way independent stations are.

But the Times doesn’t have this hangup. Whether they admit it or not, they’ve begun fundraising efforts this week. So will the NYT find something to make it fun for donors? Or do they think that the false claim to “access” is enough?

Opportunity to Interact with the Times Community

I think there are a lot of smart folks at the Times and they’ll be watching how people react and pay/don’t pay for this subscription system. For those that do pay it one month the question is, will they continue to pay? For that, they need to be purchasing something. Call them “NYT Points,” call it “NYT Membership” — I don’t care. But I think a part of it should include giving those members a stake in how the funds from their subscription are spent.

In other words, there could be a new sense of transparency and participatory control in how a news organization spends its funds. With their new metered pay wall, the NYT is just one incy-wincy step away from cracking the code to crowd-funded journalism. Why do I want to pay my $15 this month? Because then I can vote on next month’s NYT coverage. This would be the NYT using a kind of Spot.Us model.

And if that day ever comes, you won’t find anyone happier than me.

In the two years since our site has launched, we’ve funded over 160 projects with the help of 5,000 contributors, a fifth of whom contributed more than once. We’ve done this in collaboration with 95 organizations, and our reporting projects have won eight journalism awards.

We’re pushing forward, but we need advice, ideas and support from the public. You can read more at the full “State of the Spot.”

Meanwhile, we’ve had two Carnival of Journalism blog-o-rama-fests thanks to the Reynolds Journalism Institute. They’re fun and exciting, but I want input from the participants here as well. There are two more #jcarns that I’m going to host. After that, I want a fair and honest way to give the emerging community control without losing the momentum that comes from somebody taking the wheels. Got ideas? Leave them in the comments.

I have learned a lot in my experience running Web projects including Spot.Us, a non-profit startup organization that fundraises for independent journalists. Building anything from the ground up requires myriad skills. One skill in particular played a pivotal role and enabled me to avoid many pitfalls that entrepreneurial journalists face as we tread into the unknown future of our craft. The fundamentals of journalism are still required. An organization must know how to produce engaging content. But it also needs at least one person who can do project management.

Project management isn’t about middle-managers, paper-pushing or other forms of newsroom bureaucracy. Project management at Spot.Us doesn’t entail dealing with our accountant, managing freelancers or planning our publication cycle. Managing a project isn’t about “business as usual” and has nothing to do with the day-to-day grind of putting out a publication.

Project management is the ability to plan, organize and secure resources necessary to see a project from start to finish, such as building a website or mobile application. One way to think about projects is in comparison to our understanding of games (video games, board games, etc). Like all games, projects have a stated purpose, an end point or definition of winning. They also have rules or constraints. Get caught as a “fish out of water” and you lose Marco Polo. For projects, constraints are either budgetary, time or scope. And like games, projects need a player who is making decisions to try to reach the end goal within those constraints. This is the project manager’s mission, should he or she choose to accept it.

Some organizations have the wrong vision for a project. This is a natural and acceptable position to be caught in. May a thousand flowers bloom and the industry learn from these mistakes. A much worse fate, and one that is not applauded, is a vision that never comes to fruition at all because of failed project management.

Once the vision and idea of success is articulated and agreed upon, the first conversation a project manager needs to have is around constraints. All too often this conversation is absent and the project suffers. It comes down to picking and choosing battles.

TWO OUTTA THREE AIN’T BAD

Games have very real constraints. Many have a limit of “lives.” Lose your last life in Mario Bros. and the game is over; the player’s actions in the game reflect this. Other games don’t have a sense of “life or death” but put in constraints of “points.” In Monopoly the points are literally “dollars,” and you only start the game with so much, but by taking risks you can earn more. It’s a game that requires an enormous commitment of trial and error in order to build a “monopoly.” Players in Mario Bros. may be cautious, where Monopoly players will try to buy up lots of property while they can, each reacting to their constraints.

These constraints are known to the player, but if an observer doesn’t understand them, it can be confusing. Project managers need to convey their constraints to everyone involved, especially the stakeholder. I often use the following phrase: “There’s good, fast and cheap. Pick two.”

In other words, project management constraints are usually some combination of time, budget or quality. If you want a website done cheap and fast, a capable project manager will find cheap developers and designers. But be prepared for the website to have bugs. If you want quality on a low budget, the project manager may have to rely on volunteers who’ll work at their own pace. The ideal scenario is to get a site built that is both good and fast, but it will cost you a pretty penny. If you have that option, congrats; you’ve been dealt a good hand.

The project manager doesn’t make the rules, but she does play by them. There is no wrong/right choice, but these are constraints a project manager will need to know in order to make the right decision. Constraints should be made in cahoots with stakeholders so there aren’t any surprises. A good project manager finds out the budgetary and time constraints, does research, and explains what is reasonable to deliver and at what quality. Then negotiation of constraints can happen in an informed manner.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

To rescue the princess in one popular video game, Link always needs to accomplish annoying side tasks. These feel like distractions, but it’s really a matter of timing and getting things in order. He can’t kill the dragon until he has acquired the sword. Link can’t find the sword until he has won the archery contest, and you can’t win that archery contest until you earn the rupees to buy the damn thing.

Depending on the project, there will be any number of side tasks. They are not distractions, and the order in which you do them can be fatal. For example, when building a website, you want to start with a clear description of every feature, then lay out those features in a design (forgetting aesthetics/logo). You will discover new features and priorities along the way, and that’s why you save development for last, right before the aesthetics and skin of the site. Otherwise you could blow through your development budget, and any discovery in the layout phase will result in a sub-par product. If you start with the logo, you’re just plain doing it wrong.

DISTRACTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY

There are, of course, tons of practical decisions a project manager makes. What technology platform should a site be built on? Who should we hire to build or design it? What hosting service should we use? A project manager cannot be an expert on everything. But she should know how to communicate with experts, interpret their knowledge and put it to practical use.

There are always trade-offs. If a decision is made and the project manager isn’t aware of what is sacrificed, even if it turns out to be the right decision, it is being made blindly and is a poor decision. If you build a site in Drupal, you are choosing a robust starting point and sacrificing flexibility to build out custom features. If you choose Django, you are making the opposite decision. When you hire someone straight out of college, you are sacrificing experience for a lower salary and hopefully some enthusiasm. Again, there is no right or wrong. But there is informed and uninformed. Doing anything in the latter could bite you in the butt.

Every project is unique and has its own constraints. But it’s the job of the project manager to make decisions in light of constraints so the job still gets done. There is always a finish line in sight for a project manager. As news and technology collide and combine, publishers will increasingly find themselves in the position of technology companies. And technology companies live and die around their ability to launch new projects. In the near future I suspect we will all shout: “Project managers for the win!”

Public media has been on the minds and lips of a lot of Americans. Certainly the last few years have seen a growth in public media across the board from Corporation for Public Broadcasting entities (PBS, NPR) to less formal public media entities like PRX and PRI. Recently, as a follow-up to the work of the Knight Commission Barbara Cochran wrote a policy paper “Rethinking Public Media: Mort Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive.” From the Knight Commission blog post:

At a time when government funding for public broadcasting is hotly debated, Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive, a new policy paper by Barbara Cochran, offers five broad strategies and 21 specific recommendations to reform public media.
It’s an excellent piece of reading that breaks down some of the roadblocks and opportunities that lay ahead for public media.

Beyond white papers, however, it’s important that the public be able to speak their mind about public media. That’s why thanks to the support of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, the institutional home of the Knight Commission on the Information needs of communities in a Democracy, Spot.Us surveyed 500 members about the state of public media in their community.

The goal was to find out where public media is strong, weak and what suggestions the public might have for public media. Not only did this survey raise awareness about the growing role of public media, it supported media as well. Every member of our community that took the survey was given $5 in credits to fund the story of their choice on our site.

And The Survey Says….

How Big Is Your Community?
Before we can examine the survey in depth I should remind folks that this is a sponsored survey of a somewhat self-selecting community (and our community is perhaps more media-savvy than other websites). That said, our first question was aimed at getting a sense of where people lived. One of the trends we often hear is that major metropolitan areas are better served by public media than smaller locations. Our survey affirmed this.

Just over 60 percent of respondents were from major metropolitan areas. Another 17 percent were from large cities. Only a handful (12 percent) came from towns with a population of 50,000 or less. Our survey skewed toward major metropolitan areas and in total they were happier with public media than folks in more rural areas. This should be kept in the back of our minds when we dive into the remaining question and answers.

Spot.Us community member Mike Labonte summed up the frustration with public media in small towns when he wrote his suggestion to improve public media in his town: “Presence. The only public media in my city of 70,000 is the local public access cable TV station.”

The next question in our survey allowed for multiple answers: “Who has an influential role in shaping media in your area?” It’s an important question to ask because while the ecosystem continues to change many charge public media with the role to unite various media forces together. The results of this question were interesting proving once again; as much as things have changed — they also stay the same.

Newspapers and national broadcast television were considered influential by the most respondents. Just over 75 percent of people who took the survey selected papers as being influential. Local bloggers garnered 188 votes or just 37 percent of those that took the survey. While that’s still a hefty number, it was the lowest concrete choice (it performed better than “other”) and came in just below “elected officials.”
Community member Laurie Pumper noted: “One small but telling example: Public radio went out of its way to keep a citizen journalism organization from providing livestreaming of a gubernatorial debate in Minnesota. If an organization accepts public funding, I expect better cooperation with other sources of media.”

Next we asked how people got involved in public media. The respondents had three overwhelming answers: Social media, the general website and donating. The overlap between these three was also very strong. Almost everyone who said they donated engaged through the website and social media. Although the reverse trend was not as strong (i.e. somebody who engaged through social media might not donate) there was still a correlation.

In light of the number of respondents who said they volunteer or worked for public media, the number of people who attended events at their local public media station seemed a little low. Getting out the word can be very important as community member Ben Melançon said : “Dedicating the resources to come and ask what’s up, once a month. Taking matters of interest common to multiple local areas they cover and doing very in-depth reports on them.”
Next we got to the heart of the survey: How effective is public media at serving the needs and interests of diverse members of the community? While the responses to this aren’t an abysmal failure, it does show large room for improvement. A total of 11 percent thought public media in their community was doing a poor job of reflecting diversity. The vast majority of responders selected either “good” (33 percent) or “fair” (32 percent). Because these two combine for 65 percent of all responders it’s worth examining the exact language of this answers choice:

• Fair — There are occasional examples of diverse programming, but it’s not the norm.
• Good — While not perfect, there are obvious efforts to make programming more inclusive.

While these lukewarm answers were the majority only a handful of responders thought public media was doing an “excellent” or “very good” job of reflecting a communities diversity.
And then came the meatiest question: “How well do public media do of informing you about local issues?”

Again we find mixed results, but the overall trend was positive. A majority 69 percent said public media was doing either “average” or “above average” at covering local issues. While it’s great to see so few select “poor” (six percent) or “below average” (17 percent), there is still lots of room for improvement when we note that only eight percent of responders thought public media was doing “fantastic.”

In an interesting contrast with an earlier comment, community member Alexis Gonzales said this about the size of a town:

Because I live in a large city, news media — including public media — just don’t cover ‘neighborhood’ issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller city (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy … i.e., neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

Taxes

The survey also threw in a playful question regarding taxes. Since public media’s funding has been a topic of discussion, why not ask the public what they think? The question was arguably loaded, but still worth asking.

The exact language was: “British citizens are taxed $80.36 a year to support the BBC. United States citizens are taxed only $1.36. Knowing it would mean more taxes you believe the following.” Then respondents could decide if they wanted to lower taxes to $0 or raise them to “beat the British.”

This question was asked in part to educate, since many people don’t realize how little our media is subsidized by taxes compared to other countries and in part to provoke responses around a hotly debated topic.

About 20 percent of responders thought the taxes should stay the same or even be lowered to $0. Nearly half thought of expanding the taxes a little either doubling it to $2.70 or expanding it to $30. And perhaps because of how the answer was worded  (“Let’s beat the British”) a whopping 34 percent wanted to raise taxes to $80.37 to fund public media. Either the Spot.Us community has lots of public media fans or a reminder that the British public media is out-funding ours 80-to-1 was too much to bear. (Also note 49 individuals who took the survey work for public media according to their answers to question #3).

From the public’s mouth

Finally, our last open ended question sought advice and input about how public media could improve at the local level. We received 500 responses and below I have republished some of the best with the survey respondents’ permission.

Wendy Carrillo

I live in East LA / Boyle Heights. It’s very rare that good positive stories are told about my community via TV news. LA Times covers some good stories, but it’s not the norm. I would like to see my community being covered w/ national issues other than immigration. Like Latinos who serve in armed forces, or those who are making a difference in the classroom.

Tom Davidson

Engage the emerging local blogosphere — providing them promotion/audience and, potentially, revenue via bundled sales using the bully pulpit of public media. In other words, why can’t a local PBS or NPR station serve the same role as a TBD.com in Washington?

Tim Gihring

They could spice up the reporting. The no rant/no slant approach is appropriate, but the reporting is often simple, dry, and probably not engaging as broad an audience as possible as a result.

Henry Jenkins

Right now, Los Angeles seems poised to lose its PBS station, which is going independent. This is a good news, bad news situation. Some of its best current projects are local and these will continue and grow. But we will also lose some of the programs from PBS which we have come to expect and they will be missed.

Ruth Ann Harnisch

Deploy the resources of journalism majors and graduate students in the many universities and colleges located in and around the major metro areas. Collaborate with universities and colleges to cover more beats, produce more stories, create more outlets, uncover more potential advertisers and train better journalists.

Tom Stites

My community, Newburyport, Mass., is an hour north of Boston, a half hour south of Portsmouth, N.H., and an hour and 10 minutes south of Portland, Me. I listen to public radio from all three, and no one covers Newburyport or its surrounding area. In fact, we’re in a fringe reception area for all the stations. What would be really cool would be to have a low-power, listener-supported station right here in Newburyport. There’s a local AM station that plays old music but has no local news presence.

Perhaps where I live makes me an outlier, but I suspect that my situation is quite common — most public radio stations are in big cities or on university campuses in smaller places. That said, most smaller communities, including mine, don’t have colleges.

Jake Bayless

Public Media is largely the only not-for-profit trusted local and regional source of info, and source of curated content. I’d like to see that trust “capital” realized — my local station is in the process of retooling for the new media revolution — it’s not easy to change the battleship’s direction. More and amplified info like that from the Knight Commission needs to be put out there. The public at large doesn’t yet understand how vital public media SHOULD be in their lives as info consumers. Public Media orgs all should adopt “Community Media Projects” in order to learn, listen and meet the information and democratic needs of the communities they serve… everything else is broken, untrustworthy or unsuitable.

Arthur Coddington

Awareness that public media is frequently a partnership between national providers (NPR) and local stations. Those that don’t understand this partnership can dismiss the programming as not locally relevant. Visibility. Police who are present and interacting with local residents can generate greater trust and participation in public safety. Similar thing could be true of public media. If they are visible — if they are not “they” — then we feel more connected to the stories, more possibility to reach out to them when new issues arrive, etc. Engagement. Partner with schools, libraries and service orgs to unearth essential local stories, create broadcasts about them, and follow up to track impact.

Andria Krewson

Be more aggressive about giving up old ways (and sometimes long-time staffers) to free up resources and time to explore new ways of sharing information. Note on the tax question: I’d support more taxation for public media, but I’m discouraged about the track record used to spend tax money recently and would need total transparency (and some influence) on how money is spent in order to support more taxation.

Chris Mecham

We have a very active NPR-supporting community here but the simple fact is that they are charged with providing service to a huge, mountainous geographic area and while we may, as a community, have an above average rate of contribution, we also have greater infrastructure expenses than many other areas. Considering what Boise State Public Radio does with their resources I think they are doing okay. One of the features of public broadcasting funding in Idaho is that up to a fairly generous limit our contributions are counted as a tax credit. Not a deduction. A credit. “Do I want to give Butch Otter my money or do I want to give Terry Gross my money? Hmmmm.”

Lisa Morehouse

Experiment. Be willing to try and fail at new shows, new ways of delivering the news. Invest in reporting. Pay freelancers a fair wage so that journalists without financial support can enter and stay in the profession (not possible now).

Bill Day

Public media should pioneer efforts to build real-time citizen journalist networks. Using low cost distribution and collation tools, public media could become hubs for high-quality, low cost information sharing — school test scores, water quality, traffic needs, etc.

Sabine Schmidt

Through reaching out to organizations and individuals representing under-served parts of the community, especially economic and ethnic minorities. The demographic makeup of my metro area is changing rapidly due to growing Hispanic, Marshallese, and Hmong populations; except for some Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations, few media outlets report on issues such as immigration, wage theft, bilingual education, etc. Public media could a) report more extensively on those topics — not as “minority” issues but as issues affecting members of our community; this would require b) establishing a broader definition of what our community is; and c), public media could offer internships and fellowships to young and/or freelance journalists, especially because the local NPR station is run by the university’s journalism department.

Antonio Roman-Alcala

I like the Bay Citizen model, and the Public Press … one for exposing local issues to a broader audience, the other for in depth local news for locals. I don’t know if that counts as public media? Overall, I don’t pay much attention to TV news, even public channels…so I’m not sure about that. Public media seems generally underfunded; I’d like to see more funding for it, as well as movement towards a more public-serving private news media (though we know, of course, that’s easier said than done).

Alexis Gonzales

Because I live in a large city, news media — including public media — just don’t cover “neighborhood” issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller cities (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy … i.e. neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

Kaitlin Parker

Find positive happenings to report in communities that are typically only covered when something negative happens there.

Anthony Wojtkowiak

For lack of a better phrase, they need to grow some balls. My town in New Jersey is influenced by political boss George Norcross, the unions, and the mafia. And that’s not even the corruption and hubris that goes on in the city itself. What our reporters really need is assertiveness training, media law training, and self defense courses. But most of all, they need the courage to use all of that stuff.

Todd O’Neill

Our public radio and public television are separate entities that don’t work together. Although our public radio is beefing up it’s news reporting it seems simple to bring that reporting over to television. But public media is NOT JUST NPR and PBS. We have struggling cable public access community (no funding or support from the city) here and a number of online only community journalism operations (including a Knight grantee) that are all doing their own thing without coordination. Big Public Media (NPR/PBS) should be a leader to bring all of these “under the tent” and provide a real media public service to the community.

Charles Sanders

Actually, local issues aren’t my concern. I wish public media reinforced its international coverage and improved its drama, comedy … content. I envy the BBC.

Martin Wolff

As someone who listens to public media daily, it is sad that I have to try hard to think about a local issue being covered. In that respect, almost anything would improve the coverage as it feels almost, but not quite, non-existent. When local issues are covered they seemingly come in only two forms: 1. A feel good issue that is barely an issue and will create nearly zero discourse in the community. For example, holiday-lights festivals. 2. Wimpy. The interviewer/broadcaster will do nothing while two sides of an issue actively lie to the community and directly contradict each other. Fixing #1 is easy — nobody really terribly cares, so we don’t need 10 minutes of coverage about a mayor flipping the switch and lighting a tree up. Fixing #2 is harder. The public media must stand up for itself better and call out the guilty parties. The public media must step up its role as a sort of police officer of society and arrest those who break the rules.

Yvette Maranowski

ALWAYS retain vigorous capacity for citizen reporters. Fund them with equipment and training. People are busy now and have to work independently, but with lifelines keeping them connected to their media outlets. Use McChesney and Nichol‘s idea of $200 in tax credit going to every citizen, so that the citizen can donate their credit to whatever organization they choose — such as journalistic ones. Constantly produce and air/publish material about the importance of journalism — keep hitting the public with that message!

Andy Edgar

Survey people in the neighborhood for their backgrounds, locations and topics of interest, get them interested in issues that affect everyone. Focus on things like air and water quality, advice on picking up litter and why it’s important not to litter, community events, getting to know neighbors’ talents/skills, healthy alternatives to fast food and big box grocery stores. Community based ways to prevent crime/hate acts should be talked about explored and tried.

William Forbes

In my community (Minneapolis/St Paul, MN), “Public” radio and television are HUGE cash cows. They do a good job and are influential but the real inclusive and diverse media that truly serve the under-represented populations of our area are Community Radio Stations, in particular KFAI. MN Public Television/NPR/MPR/PBS could do a much better job but they are more concerned with maintaining (and increasing) corporate and government funding than with covering issues that don’t always have universal appeal.

Michael Hopkins

In its current state, public media is dangerous because it offers the illusion of complete objectivity and truth. Too many people listen to it uncritically because of this. I would like to see public media representatives ask much tougher questions of everybody and hire a much more diverse staff of journalists. The illusion will still be there, but it will match reality more closely.

Jeffrey Aberbach

My community now has a Patch website. It’s too early to judge how successful it will be in reaching out to our diverse community, but so far it appears to be more successful than the established, corporate-owned media outlet in town (a poorly staffed small daily newspaper that generates little local content).

Jeddy Lin

In my area, despite being close to a large university, not much of a public media movement exists. A more visible public media would go a long way towards creating a more progressive, diverse community.

Kitty Norton

They could provide better coverage for schools. They seem to report statistics and not real life goings-on in our schools to the community.

Luke Gies

I don’t have any television or newspaper service, so I am somewhat “self isolating” from our local media. I get most of my news from the internet, so I think one area of improvement for local media would be to increase the content and improve the usability of their websites. That is more of an improvement in distribution than in “covering the issues,” but distribution is a key component to the reporting of news.

First: Perhaps you’ve heard of South By Southwest, a festival that I lovingly refer to as “spring break for the Internet.”

This year I’m on the advisory board for the SXSW Accelerator. Why, you ask? Because this year they are looking for, among other things, news related startups.

News Related Technologies – This category pertains to applications and technologies to support the dissemination of news and information for communities, both on the content side or on the underlying business model side (an example is advertising). This could include technologies related to data, text, documents, mapping, engagement, among other areas.

If you’ve never been to SXSW I highly recommend it. Leave your suit at home – this is not a “conference” in the traditional sense. It’s a who’s who in the technology and venture capital space. Getting a chance to demo an idea there could be huge for any startup. The rope is there – now you have to tug. Learn how to apply.

Community-Funded Reporting Spreads

Check out GoJournalism.ca. It’s for all you Canadians – eh.

It is the second international site to use our code. The first – YouCommNews.com is Australian.

There is also SpotUs.It and YouCapital.It, and the soon to launch Emphas.is. While these sites don’t use our code base – they are very similar in concept. For that, I welcome them with open arms. When I first launched Spot.Us the idea was a foreign concept. Having competition is a GOOD thing. It’s a big validation of the concept and the work we’ve done at Spot.Us.

My only regret so far is the name “Spot Us” which, as apparent in the last three examples, may have started a bad trend in website names that double as puns. My bad

Related Posts

Finally: A post I published at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog on the “Newsroom Efficiency Index.” I may republish it in full on Digidave soon. It’s just a little experiment in my thinking about how news organizations can scale up by figuring out how to scale down first.

Tomorrow on the RJI blog I will probably write about how to “Keep your head down” when building a startup. That I will def. repost here soon, as I believe it is a valuable lesson that I can only take away after having been in the game now for two years.

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

Keep in mind, the survey was not scientific, and there was a degree of audience self-selection, i.e., the Spot.Us community.  Nonetheless, with several hundred respondents, we did get a diverse set of answers. One interesting thing to note is that while a previous survey showed a split (almost 50/50) in the “objectivity” debate this survey on public/private media showed a much more one-sided response. This might be because, as previously suspected, Spot.Us’ community overlaps with the “public media” demographic.

To begin, the majority of respondents reported that they listened to NPR (71 percent), read the news online (79 percent), or used nonprofit news sources (58 percent), while the minority reported that they received a newspaper at home (37 percent) or donated to nonprofit news media (41 percent).  From these numbers, we can see among other things that, although the majority listen to NPR or use nonprofit news sources, there is a sizeable gap between using nonprofit media and donating to them.

In response to a question about programming—“In general, how would you rate the quality of
news, arts and education programming on public media versus commercial media?—the vast majority (74 percent) said the programming on public media is of higher quality.  A mere 19 percent said the programming on public and private media is of equal quality, and only 5 percent said public programming is of lower quality.

Half way through the survey we even switched the ordering of these potential answers to ensure no undue influence. The first half of the respondents saw the answer “public media is of higher quality” first and the second half saw that answer last. In either case – the majority viewed the programming as higher quality.

When asked if they would support the creation of a public media endowment to increase funding for educational programs, arts, and investigative journalism, the respondents overwhelmingly said yes (84 percent), with only 3 percent saying no and the rest undecided.  Likewise, they would support overwhelmingly (93 percent) the creation of a matching grant program that would combine foundation grants with public funding to support innovation and investment in local news and journalism.

So far, all of this suggests that the respondents like to use nonprofit media; they believe public programming is of higher quality than private programming; they would support public endowment and matching grant programs to increase funding; however, they do not necessarily make personal donations to those ends.

The respondents, with their generally favorable view of public media, also said more conflicts arise in journalism that relies on commercial advertising than in journalism that relies on taxpayer funding.  Fifty-seven percent believed that to be true, while 12 percent said taxpayer funding creates more conflicts, and 31 percent said neither creates more conflicts and that strong firewalls between funding and journalists can prevent bias.

We also asked a few open-ended questions.

The first one was, “What should be the role of public and noncommercial media in the future of journalism?”  Below are a few anecdotal responses from Spot.Us members who gave us permission to publish their views.

Journalism should be supported by the public, but traditionally the expectation by newspaper executives has been to not ask for the public to support their product. Journalists and news executives have an obligation to build better arguments for the public to support the news. In order for that to happen, though, journalism needs to demonstrate value to readers.
– Denise Lockwood

Non-profit and other alternative funding models will increasingly have to make up for the loss of advertising funded journalism. NPR has done this already but more needs to happen. There will need to be a broader range of non-profit media orgs than we have right now, and non-profits focused on substantive issues (environment, human rights, etc.) will increasingly become news providers themselves. Hopefully, some of these new iterations will be exemplars in terms of how to establish and benefit from partnerships and collaborative models. We may see more “temporary” journalism outlets as non-profit news outlets spring up and die out in this transitional period.
– Melissa Wall

Journalist(s) need to figure out how to make their product of value to the community. While I love NPR and that model, nothing is wrong with a profit. Good journalism should be able to support itself, but for decades now people have ranked journalist right up there with lawyer, car salesman and politician. That has to change and we need to be honest why people feel that way.

– Eddie North-Hager

Ideally, publicly funded media should focus solely on communications that are not commercially viable. However there has to be focus on what the public is interested in, not just what is in the public interest. Without remaining relevant and interesting, public media becomes irrelevant.

– Spot.Us Community Member

Another question should be what is the public’s role in public media. I think public media should be a place where people can go to tell their stories (think storycorps) where discussions can happen where people of all sides can hear each others voices (think bbc’s have your say); chicago’s vocalo is interesting in this way. Recent “pubcamps” are interesting in this way. NPR opening up its API is interesting in this way, in that they invite programmers and technologists to participate. I think the quality of public broadcasting is high, but airtime is at a premium, they should find ways to put MORE programs on the web and open up the airwaves for new talent. I think funding is an issue too. I live in Paris and stream programs live from any number of stations; I also podcast my favorites. I don’t know which station I should support, I know I want to support specific programs. I know I want to support NPR; but I don’t have a local station and I don’t know that I want one.

– John Tynan

The second open-ended question was, “In the past, government has provided tax breaks to media companies, given broadcasters free licenses for public airwaves, funded PBS and NPR, and subsidized newspapers through legal ads and postal rates. What should be the government’s role in the future?”  Below, again, are a few anecdotal responses:

Regulation is necessary (else, the commercial media could say anything they wanted, regardless of effect or truth), but I don’t like the government’s involvement in the money behind broadcasting.  Things start to sound like China with its enmasse censorship of media incoming and outgoing. Free speech should remain free – free of censorship and influence. If you think publishing or reporting a story will keep the government from sending you extra funds, you aren’t likely to print it. Thus, the free press becomes the mouthpiece for a government and nothing more.

This said, I think government subsidizing of NPR and PBS is important because these are services funded by donations from watchers/listeners, and that is who they (should) have loyalty to first because that is where the money is coming from, rather than political parties or politicians.

– Kaylene Narusuke

The old models don’t work because in the 1980s, newspapers made a lot of money from ads and became very profitable, changing the expectations from the owners. Those expectations haven’t changed while the competition for ads has. Newspapers adopted the USA-Today model, dumbing down stories, writing shorter and more shallow stories. People want deep, well written stories in any format. Government agencies could support investigative reporting, specialty reporting, and reporting on the arts, but the public has to be willing to pay for responsible journalism.

– Yvonne

Government should recognize that high-quality journalism is an important part of a healthy democracy, and that well-informed citizens are more engaged and more likely to vote. Government should expand direct funding for public media beyond PBS and NPR by creating a grant program for organizations developing new kinds of public-media models.

– Lila LaHood

I don’t see a problem with calculated tax breaks for the media industry whether it’s limiting taxes on the purchases of paper products or electronic devices. To me that’s no different than oil companies, banks, light manufacturing getting financial breaks or incentives to conduct business. Those who represent converged or multimedia take issue with this, citing these as out-dated mediums with failed business models. Therefore, they should not be buoyed with tax dollars and in a true capitalism, failed businesses disappear and make way for newer, better models.

– Kevin Smith

All of these things are helpful, but American journalism really needs something more revolutionary right now. Stop thinking about tax breaks and advertising and start thinking about something equal to the National Endowment for the Arts, but replace ‘Arts’ with ‘Journalism’. I hope our leaders act now before we lose the 4th Estate, and a generation of enthusiastic young journalists.

– Daysha Eaton

So there you have it, the views of the Spot.Us community on public vs. private journalism.  Any of it surprise you?  Confuse you?  Bore you?  Tell us your thoughts in the comments section!