Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » spot.us

DigiDave: Redefining journalism, cit-j and ‘honest communication’

Laura Oliver — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:36:23 +0000

David Cohn, founder of crowd-funded news site spot.us, discusses why it isn’t necessarily journalism and newspapers that we should be saving, but ‘honest communication’:

“Journalism as a word is loaded because of the ministry it invokes. The profession that, since Watergate, has laid claim to it. That ministry is now a diaspora. Much like after the Gutenberg revolution the ministry lost its authority in interpreting the bible. Martin Luther showed us how. In reaction many journalists cling even tighter to that word,” writes Cohn.

“What we need to preserve isn’t newspapers. I’d argue it isn’t even ‘journalism’ as we understand it. What we need to save is something else. Something more fundamental. The ability for communities to be informed with honest information and then to mobilize based on that information.”

Full post at this link…

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Jon Bernstein: Where now for accountability journalism?

Jon Bernstein — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:33:24 +0000

Clay Shirky believes the demise of most newspapers to be inevitable, not a recessionary blip but a structural certainty. The long-term, digital future is bright but the short-to-medium term outlook is bleak for our news media.

Who, he asks, is going to pick up the mantle of accountability journalism? Shirky, New York University professor and one of the most insightful voices on digital media and its impact on news journalism, paints the following picture.

The newspaper is unsustainable for two broad reasons. First, as an advertising-supported business it has overcharged and under delivered.

This was all very well when it was the only show in town but once its recruitment business got monstered by Monster and its classifieds delisted in favour of Craigslist, the party was clearly coming to an end.

Secondly, he says, the newspaper always lacked coherence.

While people remain interested in expert editorial judgement and serendipity, they are not thirsting for the ’single omnibus publication’. The future is content unbundled, often delivered by members of the audience disseminating links via social media.

And why is this bad news for anyone except the proprietor, the publishing magnate and the benefactor?

Because, says Shirky, it leaves a vacuum where once newspapers acted as a bulwark against the excesses of commercial and political classes. In place of accountability you have ‘casual, endemic, civic corruption’.

Shirky believes new models will eventually fill that vacuum but not soon enough to replace the old, decaying model.

And where will these new forms come from? Broadly through commercially viable alternatives to the newspaper; through organisations funded by donation, endowments or taxes; and through social production, aka the crowd.

It is the latter two where we are starting to see some interesting ideas emerge. And here are a few places – from either side of the Atlantic – you may want to look to see what the future of accountability journalism may look like:

Propublica:

An independent, non-profit newsroom, ProPublica boasts the ‘largest news staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting’. Thirty-two working journalists to be precise.

Supported entirely by philanthropy, it offers the fruit of its labour free of charge – and it either self-publishes or hands it over to large media outlets.

ProPublica also has a ‘distributed reporting’ unit, which aims to draw on the energies and expertise of the pro-am crowd. It’s headed up by Amanda Michel, formerly of Huffington Post’s OffTheBus.

Huff Po, meanwhile, has its own Investigative Fund while the Center for Investigative Reporting pre-dates ProPublica by a three decades.

Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Coming soon, the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) gets to work in November and will open for business in 2010.

The model is production house, not publisher and, unlike ProPublica, it intends to sell stories into magazines and newspapers. It will be led by Iain Overton, formerly of More4 News (and an ex-colleague).

BIJ’s was created by the people at the Centre for Investigative Journalism and it will also draw on the recently launched Investigations Fund. It is able to get off the ground thanks to a £2m endowment from the David and Elaine Potter Foundation.

Spot.us:

Pioneers of ‘community funded reporting’, Spot.us has a very Web 2.0 business model.

Users of the site create news tips inspired by specific issues they are interested in that have yet to be reported. Spot.us journalists turn those tips into story pitches and small donations (increments of $20) are sought before the investigation is undertaken. The finished piece is freely available to anyone, big or small, to republish.

Only if a news organisation wants the story on an exclusive basis must it pay, in this case at least 50 per cent of the cost of the investigation.

Help Me Investigate:

Brainchild of Paul Bradshaw, a senior lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University, this is another example social production.

Launched with an initial focus on Birmingham, Help Me Investigate describes itself as ‘a community of curious people, and a set of tools to help those people find each other, and get answers’.

Recently completed investigations have sought discover why a new bus company is allowed run a service on the same route and same number but at a higher price; which Birmingham streets are issued with the most parking tickets; and how much Birmingham council spends on PR.

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

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LA Times: Spot.Us expands to Los Angeles

Judith Townend — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:27:51 +0000

Spot.us, the crowd-funded journalism venture that launched 10 months ago in San Francisco with funding from the Knight Foundation, has expanded to Southern California as its second market, the LA Times reported yesterday.

Full story at this link…

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David Cohn: Things learnt from 107 interviews

Judith Townend — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:54:54 +0000

David Cohn, Spot.us founder, shares with us a list of interviews he’s done ‘either in person, over the phone or via email,’ from his time publishing content for BeatBlogging.org, Digidave.org, and NewsInnovation.com.

Full post at this link…

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TheStar.com: Alternative funding avenues for investigative journalism

Judith Townend — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:49:28 +0000

The Toronto Star’s John Honderich looks at five options for funding investigative stories in Canada. These are already relatively well-known examples among journalist/media commentators and bloggers, but Honderich’s post is an interesting read.

Government funded or subsidised journalism
Independent non-profit newsrooms, a la ProPublica.
Using private foundations, such as Philip Stern’s the Fund for Investigative Journalism
Participatory investigative journalism, e.g Spot.us
Journalism students working in tandem with investigative reporters

Full story at this link…

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Video of crowdsourced interview with Spot.us’ David Cohn

Laura Oliver — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:58:05 +0000

Having been meaning to post this for a while, but here are the results of Alexandre Gamela’s crowdsourced interview with David Cohn, founder of the community-funded news project Spot.us.

The questions were solicited through Gamela’s blog, where the videos below were originally posted (part one is here and part two is at this link).

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Spot.us celebrates first community funded news article

Judith Townend — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:06:53 +0000

It’s all celebrations today. Spot.us is happy to announce its first community funded
news article, written by Alexis Madrigal, ‘ Changing Locomotion in Midstream – The Full Report’.

As we’ve reported before, “Spot Us” is a project of the Center for Media Change, and funded by the Knight foundation. It uses ‘crowdfunding’ – where an individual or group takes control of news by sharing the cost – to commission freelance journalists.

The Spot.us team are also pleased that their next news examples are on the way to completion, and their their future homepage is very close to being finished.

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