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"You cannot run a community if you're not informed. Journalism is really the act of informing communities so that they can make better decisions, that is part of the public service, informing communities so that together we can know where else we need to help."
--David Cohn, Founder, Spot.us
When I first heard David Cohn talk about Spot.us in the Spring of 2008 at an Innovations in Journalism conference, I thought, this is going to be big. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that Spot.us was a 2008 Knight News Challenge Winner.
Spot.Us is a nonprofit project pioneering “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us, the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important, and perhaps overlooked stories.
David is a journalist turned entrepreneur who has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times. While working toward his master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cohn worked as an Editor at newassignment.net, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web.
On July 9, 2009 I interviewed David about Spot.us for the Big Vision Podcast. Below is an edited transcript of the interview which you also can listen to online, or subscribe to via iTunes.
We started our conversation by David explaining what Spot.us is and how it works:
David Cohn: Spot.us is trying to pioneer this concept of community-funded reporting which is the act of distributing the cost of hiring a reporter across a lot of different people. 50 people giving $20 each is enough to hire a reporter to go more in depth into a specific topic that those 50 people think is important. We're taking the art of freelancing for writers, and making it much more transparent and much more public.
Freelancers literally put their story ideas and their pitches up on our site, and they say, "This is the story I want to tackle." We look for people to partner with them, whether it be members of the community to donate small amounts of money, or news organizations to provide editorial to then push the story into completion.
Britt Bravo: Why is this necessary? Why is this needed?
It's needed in a couple different ways. The first, and sort of most obvious, is the economic situation of newspapers. Now, it's almost not even breaking news to say that newspapers are facing, to be quite frank, an economic death spiral. I think at the national level we're always going to have The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post to do national investigations, but what we really are threatened to lose in the next year to five years is local investigations and local reporting.
It's easier for people to get really passionate about national issues, but local issues are just as important. Democracy happens at a local level still, so we still need that kind of civic, local reporting.
The other reason why I think it's important is just for the trade of journalism, or the craft of journalism in general. It is traditionally very guarded. It's funny, it's a profession that's supposed to educate the public, but the profession itself was always very closed and insular.
On Spot.us, we're trying to bring in a culture of transparency in journalism, where we say, "Invite the public into the reporting from day one. Just let us know what stories you're even starting to think of working on."
Where did the idea come from?
There are two or three stories that all came together. The first is that I was a freelancer myself for a long time, and freelancing is horribly antiquated. The big advent of freelancing, since the Internet, is that instead of snail-mailing my story ideas to editors, I would email them. And that's like the great thing that the Internet brought me was email!
I was doing that, and I always thought it was kind of silly because the Internet can provide one-to-many communication, or many-to-many communication, and yet freelancing was still this one-to-one relationship: a freelancer and the editor, and those are the only two people involved. I was always thinking, how could a freelancer pitch the world?
The other two things that happened was that I started working a lot in participatory journalism. I'm a big believer in participatory journalism, or citizen journalism, whatever you want to call it. But I also think that it has some limitations.
I'm a big
