Non profit
Spot.us: crowd-funding to save journalism
As newspapers across the globe seek new ways of surviving, could crowd-funding provide an answer?
di Staff
The sorry state of the business of journalism has many with their thinking caps on to find ways of making a fundamentally non profitable trade sustainable. One of the solutions being road tested is Spot.us, the US based, crowd-funded news platform.
The website’s founder, David Cohn, recently attended the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, where he revealed that even though his business is one-and-a-half years old he still considers it a start-up.
The concept behind it is simple: low overheads, so a staff of three (including himself) , none of whom are reporters. The reporters pitch their ideas directly to the web platform and anyone who likes the pitch and thinks it deserves being funded can do so via the website. If the target sum is reached, then the story will be reported if not, it won’t. Critics say that this kind of journalism means that stories go to the highest bidder. But in the words of Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine and author of the book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business: “It’s not like the crowd is killing the newspaper. Lots of things are killing the newspaper. The crowd is at once a threat to newsrooms, but it’s also one of several strategies that could help save the newspapers.”
So how sustainable is this model? The website was launched San Francisco with a 340 thousand dollar (240 thousand euros) grant from the Knight News Challenge in 2008 and it still supports 30 per cent of its activities with that money. The rest, 70 per cent, comes from its own revenue streams which include individual philanthropy.
“My goal is to wean off major philanthropy … if in the long term Spot.us can’t support itself … then I have to question why we’re doing it in the first place”, said Cohn.
