An update from Dave Cohn, founder of crowd-funded journalism start-up Spot.Us, tells us that recent pitch was brought to life in 11 days with the help of a donation of $325 (50 per cent of the costs required) from independent news organisation The Raw Story.
The article on the shooting of Oscar Grant in the Oakland area, pitched by independent journalist Sam Arbizo, also attracted individual donations from a host of journalists – both local and national.
The Raw Story site will get to publish the content first, as part of its donation, says Cohn.
This is part of Spot.Us’ aim in action: matching organisations as well as communities with investigations and stories they want done. Funding in this way allows cash-strapped/time-strapped news orgs to participate and publish quality, local content.
This is the idea EXACTLY!! I’m really excited to see if we can duplicate this, triplicate, etc, etc.
It’s also reasonable to expect, in the future, news orgs to get involved early – give 50% and then write a blog post to their own audience and ask them to help fund the other half.