A problem known to be holding back citizen journalism is the question of business models. Collectively providing a public good is bound to be difficult. At least in my experience of the online journalism movement, ‘business’ is not a dirty word the way it is in arts circles – ‘profit’ is, maybe, but the importance of sustainably financing large-scale participatory journalism projects is clearly evident among citizen journalists worldwide.
Steve Outing, from Poynter Online, provides a good summary of some of the options available and operating around the place – including a missive to the mainstream media.
But I’ve been sporadically following this guy DigiDave, who runs a community-funded reporting project in the States, called Spot.us. Spot.us is a ‘crowdfunding’ experiment. Members of the community pitch ideas they’d like to have investigated and reported. Spot.us then collects donations from those who want the same story written.
A clear benefit of this type of reporting is that it ensures that stories generally under-reported by the traditional media get picked up and covered, a cornerstone function of the blogosphere as a participant in the fifth estate.
This is something that Australia hasn’t tried, as far as I can tell, and considering I assumed Australia to be five years behind the US, I was surprised to stumble on this media release about the Australian version, the The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. Other coverage I could find was limited to regurgitations of this, and advertisements for board nominations.
One journalist’s concerns ‘about the impact of the global collapse of the business models supporting traditional media forms’ is the silver lining of all this economic concern if it leads to journalism being carried out in the public interest, independent of current commercial motives of the predominant outlets in the world.
I can’t find a website for the Foundation, as it seems the project is still in the embryonic stage. The report on Crikey blog The Content Makers mentioned that the Foundation would support projects through philanthropy and individual donation, while the report in the Australian was that the Foundation would co-ordinate community-funded journalism in the style of Spot.us, et al.
Either way, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the Foundation in Australia. At my most pessimistic, I assume that Australian readers are too passive for the sort of initiative required to make a go of something like this. I hope to be proven wrong.
The model seems to work well in the States. Spot.us recently celebrated the first six months of their website, after publishing 23 stories over the first 24 weeks. Founder DigiDave also blogs extensively at his own website, often coughing up lucid and succinct advice to anyone interested in sprouting a little community-funded journalism operation of their own.
The Spot.us experiment is funded by some grant money DigiDave was awarded, and one of the grant’s requirements is that he make the knowledge and experience public, so that others can pick up with the project easily and learn from it. Following this project, its offshoots and the Australian should make for interesting fodder.
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Tags: crowdfunding, minority coverage, public funded journalism, start up grants
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