Tag Archives: business

Crowdfunding News and the “News Mutual Fund”

4 Dec

I’ve been looking lately at some of the “crowdfunding” models for journalism, in which audience members donate money to specific stories whose production they want to support. Here’s my idea for a “news mutual fund” – a concept slightly different from the crowdfunding models I’ve seen so far.

One well-known crowdfunding project for journalism is Spot.Us. This organization provides a platform for public donations to proposed stories in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Potential donors can read a pitch for the story, follow the reporter’s blog and see other content related to the proposed story.

The Spot.Us site.

I’m afraid, though, that it’s a bit optimistic to expect the audience to evaluate, donate to, and follow up on stories at the international, national, state and local levels, as would really be needed to make this model widespread and effective throughout journalism. Not only is it a financial commitment, but it’s also a time commitment that goes beyond what most people will consider for news. I doubt most people will make this investment in news, especially given current levels of public appreciation for journalism.

It seems to me that if this model is to succeed, it needs to look at another model of investments that has been very successful: the mutual fund. As I see it, today’s crowdfunding possibilities – limited as they are – are like individual stock investments, with a “socially responsible investing” angle. A donor chooses to donate to X story because he or she feels that it has long-term value for a personal information “portfolio” and for a community.

But just like investing in individual stocks, picking those stories is a lot of work. People like mutual funds for their financial investments because they eliminate that detailed effort. In a mutual fund, a trusted manager with a proven track record is given funds to allocate based on a chosen model of investment. Many different mutual funds exist: some that are more risky, some that are less so, some that invest in particular industries and some that express particular ideological perspectives.

Maybe this is how crowdfunding could be approached – as a news mutual fund, rather than as a stock-picking process. Spot.Us does provide an option to simply donate money and allow the organization to choose where the funds are assigned. But little transparency is provided – as far as I can tell – as to how that selection is made.

In a news mutual fund, a manager would determine where news investors’ money was directed according to defined story selection parameters.

Sound like an editor? Does a news mutual fund sound a bit like buying a newspaper subscription and hoping your money goes to the “right” stories? Sure.

But most of the audience doesn’t know how editors select stories, and they have never had any input into that process. A more open “news mutual fund” process would lead to greater credibility and audience engagement, while eliminating the detail work on the audience’s behalf of doing the story selection work themselves. It would also maintain a degree of audience accountability for the manager, because if stories began to deviate from the investors’ chosen parameters, they could redirect their money to a different news fund.

I’m sure there are weaknesses to this model as well, just as there are in mutual fund investing, so the option to invest in individual stories – some of which could be collaborations among news producers – should still be available.

In a post on MediaShift, Spot.Us founder David Cohn noted that the site was able to fully fund a project that did not yet have a reporter assigned to it, meaning that the site’s managers developed the idea and then, once it was funded, could hire a freelancer to work on it. He says that the logistics of this process are much easier for the site, and also open up the chance to market the story to traditional news organizations that could reimburse Spot.Us its funding in exchange for first publication rights to the story. So here’s a case where Spot.Us could operate like the news mutual fund manager that I’m envisioning here. They control the funds and their allocation, and have already told the audience how this money will be spent. The development of the story, its assignment and its distribution would ideally be equally transparent through updates provided on the site.

The crowdfunding model for journalism is still in its early days, and there will no doubt be lots of experimentation. Testing the public’s willingness to invest in news is a daunting (and somewhat frightening) task, but with a variety of approaches, it might turn out to be an exciting and engaging process for journalists and the audience both.

Making a Subscription a Source of Pride

30 Oct

“Engagement” is a buzzword in discussions of the survival of print media. In a world of shiny digital objects that distract readers from traditional print media, readers have to be more engrossed and invested in their uses of print, both within the print product and when they visit affiliated Web sites. (I wrote about this concept a bit in a recent MediaShift post with regard to the late Gourmet.)

natl geo

National Geographic maps. Photo by Flickr user retro_traveler.

One of my favorite books to pick up on occasion is a heavy, glossy volume called Magazines that Make History by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Browsing through it today, an interesting paragraph on National Geographic jumped out at me:

To [Alexander Graham Bell, who became president of the National Geographic Society in 1897], the National Geographic Magazine was a way to build a larger organization that would welcome into Society membership everyone interested in the world, exploration, and discovery. Until then, the privilege of contributing to the grand private expeditions that fascinated the nineteenth-century public or to accounts of unknown peoples, inaccessible places, and stern trials to overcome had been reserved to men of science and men of wealth. Bell understood that, even for the simplest of men, supporting these investigations was a source of pride. So he set out to open the Society’s rosters to all who were willing to contribute $2 a year for a magazine subscription, whether they were scientists or schoolmasters, aristocrats or artisans. Some members of the board of trustees opposed the proposal vigorously, but in the end it carried.

After starting this new program and hiring a new editor in 1899, the society and the magazine’s readership grew nearly tenfold by late 1905, to almost 11,500 members, say Angeletti and Oliva.

By opening the opportunity to contribute to previously inaccessible projects, National Geographic increased its readers’ investment – literal and figurative – in the magazine. Both magazines and newspapers today could experiment with similar models, by having readers contribute financial resources or time to larger projects as well as adding content to digital or print editions.

Newspapers may have a hard time creating projects like this out of fear of losing their purported objectivity. However, one possible reason for declining news readership could be the sense among the audience that their subscriptions provide them with little information that actually can be used to make a difference in their communities.

Civic journalism was (is?) an effort to include the public in the development of news content so it would better suit their communities’ needs. Citizen journalism, the actual production of news by citizens, is a more direct way to incorporate readers’ interests, as is crowdsourcing journalistic projects.

One magazine that has adopted a model similar to that of National Geographic is Good, which donates all subscription proceeds to a charity selected by the subscriber. The subscriber also chooses the price: $10, $20 or $50.

Good‘s rationale [PDF] is that magazines make so little on their subscriptions anyway that it’s worthwhile to make the subscription fee a donation, then sell advertising to pay the bills. Good has now donated over a million dollars to various charities using this method, while also drawing a spendy, attractive audience with a $100,000 household income.

Clearly, something about this model is working, and while Good‘s content is strong and interesting, the magazine is also likely pulling in readers through a sense of shared investment in social justice.

good party

Good Magazine also has events where readers and Web users can gather. Photo by Flickr user chuck_heaton.

So what else can print media do to create a shared participation in a mission, one that makes reading and continued subscription worthwhile? This task goes beyond just making a Web site interactive or encouraging reader submission of content. It’s a feeling of community and purpose that is intangible, but may be crucial to sustaining an active readership.

Rethinking Independence and Our Media

4 Jul
Photo by Flickr user ricardo.martins

Photo by Flickr user ricardo.martins

What is true independence? From a rethinking of the term for our contemporary challenges, Beyond Independence, by Robert Jensen and posted today at Zspace:

…we all know that we are not independent beings but profoundly interdependent with each other, other organisms, and the non-living world. The task is to create a system that gives us freedom from the illegitimate authority that people and institutions attempt to impose on us, but recognizes our obligations to each other. One way to think through this is to imagine what a world would look like if power were not “over” but “with,” if we understood that our power can be magnified in collaboration with others.

Jensen’s words brought to mind for me the nature of our current media system, though he intends his discussion of the issue on a much larger scale. I find our current media system to be largely an “imposition” upon media audiences. True, we can always turn off the TV or computer and walk away, but most of us want the connection to current events and our culture that media provide. So we end up using media products that are created by corporations, for the most part, and whose goal is to generate profit for their producers, not to enlighten and inform us or to improve our society. We use media products that regard us as consumers, not as citizens, and that care little for our “pursuit of happiness” beyond making sure we watch commercials and buy stuff.

Other models of media production are available, and some of the most potentially powerful options follow the alternative definition of independence that Jensen offers: independence and power found through connecting with other people and, indeed, relying upon them – as opposed to maintaining passive audiences with little connection to the source of media or to each other. These alternative systems can be large-scale, as in public media on the national level, or micro-scale, as in small online social networks around topics of interest.

Two examples of “interdependent” media systems that would free us from the corporate concerns of today’s media are publicly funded media systems – along the model of the BBC or a souped-up, politically independent remodel of PBS – and the creation of community media, like low-power FM stations or local nonprofit news sites like Voice of San Diego.

These systems force the interdependence of creators and users by requiring funding to come from the public, thereby (ideally) increasing transparency and the accountability of media creators to their consumers. They also offer opportunities for audiences to contribute their own voices to the mix, as in comments on blogs and video uploading.

These advantages make it possible for media consumers to become part of the creation process, and therefore the ultimate quality of the media products is dependent partly upon their contributions, whether financial (via taxes or donations) or creative (via their addition of their own content). Either way, the media created through these models are certainly far more “independent” than anything we see in today’s corporate media. They represent us – our voices, our interests and our needs as citizens – and in fact require us to be active and responsible to each other. The growth of these types of media can ensure that we continue to work toward democratic goals, rather than merely the goal of profit – while putting power into the audience’s hands, not the hands of media corporations.

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