Online Journalism: Donations Now Being Accepted For Community Funded and Based Journalism. 

Amid traditional media's bloodletting, nonprofit news outfits like Spot.Us are experimenting with community-funded journalism on the Web.

A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want

You think your local water supply is polluted. But you’re getting the runaround from local officials, and you can’t get your local newspaper to look into your concerns. What do you do?

A group of journalists say they have an answer. You hire them to investigate and write about what they find.

The idea, which they are calling “community-funded journalism,” is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area, where a new nonprofit, Spot Us, is using its Web site, spot.us, to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting. But the experiment has also raised concerns of journalism being bought by the highest bidder.

The idea is that anyone can propose a story, though the editors at Spot Us ultimately choose which stories to pursue. Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn’t materialize, the idea goes unreported.

“Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,” said David Cohn, a 26-year-old Web journalist who received a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to test his idea. “I’m not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model.”

Rather than sponsoring a story, what if you allowed readers to sponsor a reporter? In July, the rural town of Northfield, Minn., "hired" Bonnie Obremski to cover local topics like crime, education, and events on an existing blog called Locally Grown. Obremski's assignment is the pilot phase for a program being developed by Leonard Witt, a professor of communication at Kennesaw State University, just outside of Atlanta. Currently, Obremski's salary and expenses are paid for entirely by a grant from The Harnisch Foundation, but in coming months, Witt plans to raise enough local support from Northfield residents to pass the entire cost on to them. A community of 1,000 potential contributors, he says, each paying between $1 and $2 per week, would be sufficient. People in the community understand that eventually they'll be asked to ante up.

Most publishers have followed the advertising dollars to the Web, only to find revenues from online ads growing too slowly to offset declines in print ads. So, if online advertising can't save the media any time soon, what will? A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

Organized around a group of readers bound by location or an area of interest, these new Web sites solicit donations to pay for the work of professional journalists. While the collection plate is small, and in most cases the sites are relying on supplemental funding from advertising, grants, or other institutional donations, their founders say that readers who help underwrite the news become engaged in the process of reporting and storytelling in meaningful ways.

Giving Donors a Say

There's little sign community-centric models are intriguing mainstream media outlets, but if some of them do prove successful, perhaps they will be gradually introduced into a business that's already reliant on advertising. They could be seen as new sources of revenue and community engagement. "Much of the discussion in journalism has been looking to replace one model with one model," says Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's not going to be that simple. It's going to be a bunch of slices making up one pie."

To be sure, publicly funded news is not a novel concept in the U.S. Both the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio rely on audience support. But they also collect sizeable donations from the government-backed nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And while PBS, NPR, and their numerous local affiliates have established reputations for quality, investigative journalism, they typically don't offer donors a hand in the process, as many of the new sites do. "I think this is about the public's desire to play a larger role in news and journalism," Jarvis says.

For starters, how about letting readers handpick the stories they want produced? By publishing stories on the internet there is no limit to who and where, and how far your story will reach.

Story Sources: Business Week December 24, 2008:Douglas MacMillan;  New York Times, August 23, 2008: Sarah Kershaw ; Stoppa Media March 23, 2009:K. Randolph.