DigiDave | Communication is Key

How to Build Your Own Community Funded Reporting Site

If you are an entrepreneur - I am handing this one to you on a silver plate.

Just about every week I get an inquiry from someone to start their own version of Spot.Us. From up North (Canada) to down South (Brazil) and all the way over to Australia. I've gotten requests on how Spot.Us can expand to new regions. So here it is....

The code for spot.us is 100% open source.
(Technically I haven't slapped an OS license on it. But I will.. promise. And in the meantime, this is a poor man's version of it: "you can use the code.")

I wanted to wait until I had some more features to do this post. And now - those features are ready. Since we are also in the Chronicle today - I figure it is a good time to give away any secret sauce we might have.

What this means:

• We have absorbed 90-95% of the cost to start your own community funded reporting site.
• It can be nonprofit or for-profit. You could end up making LOTS of money if it works for you! .... just don't forget to hire me ;)
  
• I'll help. If somebody is very serious about this - I will get on the phone or even meet in person to talk about how you can do this.
  

The steps and the general costs

1. Download the spot.us code: Which has lots of new features!!!. Cost = $0
2. Buy a URL: cost = $10
3. Get hosting: cost = a few hundo's a month. Use Amazon EC2 to save some money.
4. Get a merchant account (also need a payment gateway): A few hundo's on installation + about 3% off every credit card transaction. You can use PayPal to save on installation and if you are a nonprofit Google Checkout will save you the 3% credit card charge.
5. Get up and running: You'll have to hire a Ruby on Rails person to install the code from step one and sync it up with the merchant account in step four. A good RoR developer can cost up to $140 an hour. But they won't have to do any heavy lifting - so somebody who is adequate (maybe $70-$80 an hour will do). Total cost: anywhere from $0 if you call in a favor to $1,000 - still relatively cheap in context.
6. Change the text: You will probably want to change some of the text on the site. Replacing "spot.us" with whatever you call your organization. Change the text on the about page, etc. I would recommend looking over the terms of service, privacy policy etc. Make sure you are cool with all of it. I recommend hiring the developer from step five to set up your own computer to run an instance of the spot.us code - so you can tweak this text to your hearts content without having to pay somebody an hourly rate to administer your text changes.

Next steps

• Find some reporters.
• Or: Just put up pitches yourself - as we've started doing on Spot.Us. If you raise enough money - then I gauruntee, you'll find reporters.
• Go forth and report.

Ideas

• Put up a pitch that is really a beat: "I will cover city hall in town X for Y months. If we can raise Z dollars by time this is done - I'll continue coverage for another Y months.

Feel free to contact me: david at spot dot us.

Why would I give this away?

• I am young and naive.
• It will make me look good if others try it.
• I believe in it.
• I’m required to by the terms of my grant from Knight Foundation ;)
  

So if you are serious - get in contact with me. I'll give you a tutorial on the admin interface of the site and we can talk strategy.

January Carnival of Journalism - How to support journalism online financially

This months Carnival of Journalism is hosted by Paul Bradshaw. He writes:

"Given the LA Times hitting a point where online ads support editorial (if not the roof over their heads) I’d like to set the theme as ‘How to support journalism online financially’ – that may be ads or subs (the NY Times iTunes model is another recent angle), the increasing role of foundations and donations (Spot.us), or more innovative web-native models"

Well, lets get my obvious bias out of the way. As the founder of Spot.Us - I think the idea of "community funded reporting" has a lot of merit and I'll go into more detail why in this post. I do want to preface it by saying: it is not the only model out there. This is not the "key" to journalism's financial woes - but I have yet to be discouraged and convinced to turn around and give up.

The gift economy in America is $300 billion of which 75 percent ($225 billion) comes from individual donors. So while Spot.Us had a great first month raising almost $5,000 - I don't believe we've even scratched the surface.

More importantly, Spot.Us is one representation of an idea -- "community funded reporting" -- which should be MUCH bigger than our small nonprofit. There are other examples of it already in ReelChanges.org and Representative Journalism* but there are COUNTLESS individual examples of 'community funded reporting' from Talking Points Memo and Ana Marie Cox all the way down to when a blogger on a specific topic puts up a paypal button.  (Soon I'll release the code under an open source license and people can create their own community funded sites).

The realities: Advertising dollars are still needed - so I'm glad that the LA Times has reached a new level of sustainability. Spot.Us and "community funded reporting" cannot sustain an entire newsroom or an individual's entire freelancing career. Nor will you ever hear me claim otherwise.

But community funded reporting can help fill in news holes - and as we close secondary papers and shrink newsrooms - there will be big news holes, especially when it comes to larger, expensive investigations that typically require more funding than they will produce in advertising.

I am finding out more and more every day that certain types of investigations the public will fund and others, they won't. There must be a public good presented. In short: We can fund stories on education, police, poverty, but we won't be able to crowdfund that profile of a celebrity. Lucky for publishers - that is the kind of content advertising can support.

What needs to happen for "community funded reporting" to take off?

First it is a question of marketing: The public has to know that this is a meaningful way to donate, just as they donate to goodwill, and journalists have to learn to sell their work as a public good.

Larger publishers must experience and say "this reporting needs your support." They have the audience and the trust - and that is why I made sure that Spot.Us integrates very nicely with any news organizations should they want to participate. But in truth, they can do this without Spot.Us.

Larger bloggers should experiment. What Anna Marie Cox did is a great example of "community funded reporting." I often use Robert Scoble as an example of where "community funded reporting" couldn't go wrong. Scoble has a niche within tech and already has a sponsor, but imagine (just for sake of argument) it fell through, just as Radar Magazine fell through for Anna Marie.

Scoble could easily propose to do an investigation into something tech-specific like (again just for fun) Sun Microsystems (it would have to be within his tech niche) and could probably be funded overnight. If Scoble wanted to raise 5k - that whould just be 500 people giving $10 each. That is just 1 percent of his 50k followers on twitter. According to the 1% 9% 80% rule from Wikipedia (which is holding true on Spot.Us) it is very possible.

Now that might only last Scoble a month, but I bet he could do that 4-6 months of the year. The other 6-8 months he might have to find something else, but I never claimed Spot.Us was a career maker. But it certainly wouldn't hurt.

I use Scoble as an example because it is easier to imagine with his magnitude of followers. But I believe anyone with 50k readers that is an expert on a specific niche could do the same. SFist? Oakland Tribune? Michael Pollan covering food? LaughingSquid could spread the word about something he is passionate about? If the pitch was right (obviously an important factor) I feel confident they could all fundraise an in-depth investigation of their choice. And those are just off the top of my head here in SF. Think nonprofit news for a moment (Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, ChiTown and... gasp, ProPublica, and you start to get a sense of what is possible).

But I digress.... "How to support journalism online financially"

There is always the possibility that.... it isn't.

Journalism has been financially sustainable in the past because it held a monopoly on the means of mass communication. There is no monopoly anymore. Perhaps as a result, it is no longer sustainable. End of story.

But guess what... Art (high art) has never been sustainable in the true sense of the word - but it has always been around and nobody is questioning its future (pop art, pop journalism etc is a separate issue). Spot.Us is built around the idea that journalism, like the arts, is no longer sustainable in the true sense of the word, through advertising - but can go nonprofit and serve the public and therefore merit public patronage.

I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps journalism is still sustainable via an updated advertising model on the web. And if I am - I would be happy. If I am wrong I believe it will be because of a mixture of tools that in combination keep a news operation alive. That combination being advertising, subscriptions and syndication. I suspect other members of the Carnival discussed this in more depth than myself.

Community funded reporting is one angle which I am bias towards and I had to get my peace out. The real answer: we don't know. I think there will be lots of splintering and every news organization will have to figure this question out for themselves. There are no more cookie cutter business models.

*disclaimer ReelChanges.org is my fiscal sponsor as a nonprofit and I'm an advisor on RepJ).

Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left

The following was my final project to graduate with a Masters from Columbia's journalism school. I reported and wrote this article almost two years ago. Its foundation can be found here. I have no good excuse for sitting on it this long.

The thesis:

1. The Dean campaign in 2004 didn't elect a President, but it did become a breeding ground for new leadership in liberal politics.
2. The software behind this grassroots movement became politicized and powered the progressive left which has since come of age.
   

I am finally getting around to publishing it now for two reasons:

• To my knowledge it is the only close examination of the technology and techies behind the Dean campaign. I hope I did that period of history justice: The story below doesn't show it - but I spoke/studied close to 40 Deaniacs: From (A)ldon Hynes to (Z)ack Exley
  
• That history is more relevant now that Obama, an obvious descendant of Dean's online organizing techniques, has proven they can be used successfully.

And so I am publishing

Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left

It was a cold and snowy January evening in Burlington Vermont when Zack Rosen heard the words he'd been dreading and half-expecting from his candidate Howard Dean, the onetime Democratic frontrunner for president, turned laughing stock. 

Rosen, a computer science major who had dropped out of college his sophomore year to volunteer for Dean was bundled in a snow jacket and pants, like most of the other campaigners who were milling around that afternoon. Rosen and Clay Johnson, a software engineer for the Dean campaign, were sitting together at Rosen's cubical, which held three computer monitors. Nearby they had mounted a television on a portable stand where the two stared bleakly at the live broadcast of Dean speaking from the Iowa caucus. Johnson began to wag his head in disbelief to Rosen. As Dean tried to reenergize his campaign, after finishing a disappointing third, he produced a ten second sound bite where he appeared to be yelling uncontrollably at the crowd. The "Dean Scream" was captured by television cameras and rebroadcast across America, turning Dean from a presidential hopeful to a Saturday Night Live Skit.  

Everything Rosen, a 20-year-old computer programmer had worked for was unraveling before his eyes. "Things got pretty out of control pretty quickly. People circled off into their groups of friends and started talking about doing their own thing," said Rosen. 

Leading up to the Iowa defeat, Rosen had carefully orchestrated the development of the social networking features that came to power Dean's Internet success, mustering the magic of an obscure but robust content management system from Belgium, known as Drupal.   

Thanks to Rosen, Drupal was powering hundreds of local Dean Web sites around the country. If you were an active Dean supporter, whether you knew it or not, you had encountered a Drupal site. And if you were a Dean organizer, by time the campaign was done, you were intimate with the software. 

The night of the "Dean Scream" Rosen had to find his way home. He lived on the other side of town and didn't have a car. He relied on rides from other campaigners. The bench near the parking lot behind Dean's Burlington headquarters, normally a place for strategic conversations, was filled with nervous campaign staffers chain smoking. "People tried their best to do their jobs, but everyone knew how bleak the situation was," says Rosen, who stayed with the campaign another month only to return back to the University of Champaign Illinois where he dropped out a year earlier. Completely broke Rosen relied on his college friends for a few weeks while he regrouped. When the dust settled, Rosen decided not to go back to school. It had crossed his mind, but he longed to repeat the magic of the Dean campaign. “All these ideas and methods that we were doing could have been used by many different groups of people, but we were kids, we didn't know anything about anything," says Rosen. 

The Dean campaign didn't elect a President, but it did become a breeding ground for new leadership in liberal politics.  "The phenomena was a self-organizing thing that happened around Dean, and the campaign was smart enough that they didn't snuff it out, they started looking for ways to work with it," says Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a hub for technologists and politicians to share ideas.

Work As If......

(Image inspiration)

Because .... you are.

From a blog post I wrote yesterday at Spot.Us giving a general run down of where we are two weeks into the "official" launch.

On a P.S. Note: Want to give this Thanksgiving? Why not help support a recently laid off journalist who wants to continue doing what he loves to do.

Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting

It's a simple principle: Journalism is a process, not a product - and that process should be participatory.

That sentence describes what I have worked for throughout my journalism career. I am constantly trying to push that principle forward. It started as a freelancer for Wired.com, continued through my work at Columbia Journalism Review and freelancing for Seed Magazine. Working for Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis obviously pushed my career forward and gave me the opportunity to work on amazing citizen journalism projects like Assignment Zero, Beat Blogging, NewsTrust and the Networked Journalism Summit and more.

I've been very lucky in my career that I've had the opportunity to always push boundaries. I hope I can continue to do so for many years to come. Today it's official - Spot.Us, my most recent and perhaps largest project, is launching.

I'm looking to tackle a large problem with a small executable solution.

The problem: Revenue.

Journalism is a process not a product, but that process takes time and people who do it professionally need to be compensated.

The Solution: Community Funding.

The process of journalism should be participatory - and perhaps one way it can be made participatory is if the public has the opportunity to commission the journalism they want to see.

Traditionally .001% of the public has a freelance budget to hire a journalist. We call those people "editors." Spot.Us is an attempt to increase the percentage of people that can have an editorial influence. I am incredibly passionate about this project. As I noted when I first announced it at NewAssignment.net - I would be perfectly content if this becomes my lifelong contribution to journalism.

How it works!

Anyone can create a "story tip." These can be anything - but must have a local Bay Area focus. We will expand into other regions soon.

• Here's a real example: How effective are the homeless shelter resources?.

Reporters create story "pitches": These can be inspired by tips or their own original idea.

• Here's an example: How Does the Economic Downturn Affect Small San Francisco Businesses?

News Organizations can get exclusive rights to content if they donate 50% or 100% towards a pitch. Any extra proceeds go back to the original funders.

If no news organization pays for exclusive rights - we will still make the content available to republish by anyone for free and publish it on our site.

That's how it works, so what is next?

That's Where You Come In!!!

Yes, your time is precious, but if you believe that journalism is a public good, everyone wins and your donation of time, effort or money won't be for nothing - it will mean EVERYTHING!

Citizens: I need your help. You are the only ones that know what stories are untold. Let us know what you want investigated by creating a tip. Do the ground level community organizing around pithces and tips you are passionate about - grow the network. Just 40 people donating $25 each is enough to fund the average story. In return you get a new sense of editorial power. Finally you can determine what investigations get reported on in your community.

Reporters: Try pitching the public. If it works - you'll get paid for doing what you love. You can build out your portfolio, find new story ideas from the tips and through Spot.Us you can pitch traditional news organizations and the public at the same time!

News organizations: It's time for freelancers and publications to move forward together. Use Spot.Us to stretch your freelance budget, discover a fresh pool of talent and forge positive relationships with your readers. If you have freelancers you already work with - why not let them crowdfund half their wage on Spot.Us?

Journalism hasn't had it easy lately. But journalism MUST survive the death of its institutions. I earnestly believe that journalism, as a process, plays an integral role in our local democracies. I hope Spot.Us can play a small part in making sure we continue to move forward in that vein.

ONWARD!!!!!!

(Oh... check out http://spot.us too)

Spot.Us: Looking for Local Reporters, News Organizations and Civic Leaders

Spot.Us has a site. It's not at the URL "spot.us" yet. I'm considering it "in beta" right now and sending messages out to reporters and civic leaders trying to seed it with some content before we go live (hopefully in a week or so).

The call out

Are you a freelance journalist in the Bay Area?
Is there an investigation you've wanted to do but haven't been able to sell to newspapers?

Are you a news organization that needs help with their freelance budget?
Do you have freelance journalists you trust, but can't keep them on your roster?

Are you a civic leader that has ideas for investigations you want to see come to life?
Interested in being the seed that starts an investigation in your part of the Bay?

If so - CONTACT ME.

I'll point you to the beta site which will go live once we have 3-5 solid pitches and another 3-5 solid tips.

Next week I'll be in New York for the New Business Models for News conference where I will be talking about Spot.Us and although I won't be here in San Francisco, you know where my heart will be. I'm taking no breaks right now (actually working overtime) - so don't hesitate to contact me.

ONWARD!!!!

First look at spot.us before launch

First look at Spot.Us in Action

This morning I had an early video chat with the developers of spot.us. I did a video capture of the conversation, which included demonstrating the basic action of spot.us for the first time.

The site isn’t complete. As you’ll hear me say near the end, this is just the CORE of the site. That includes.

• Community members creating and pledging towards “tips.”
• Reporters creating pitches and collecting donations.
• Searching for tips and pitches.

Of course - this is just the beginning. But it gives you a sense of the progress we are making. The next two weeks will hopefully build this out.

• Allow reporters to attach a tip to a pitch (essentially reporters can “ping” groups of tip pledges to let them know about their pitch).
• The publishing aspect of all this
• LOTS MORE.

To get a sense of how all this is happening (and to see spot.us in action) watch the video below.

Click To Play

The Future of Journalism - What Does it Look Like? USC

Giving a presentation tomorrow at USC as part of a faculty symposium. I think I'm playing the part of the young web-savvy journalist.

Below is a slideshare of the quick talk I'll be giving. It's not 100% self-explanatory, but it gives a good sense of where I'm going.

USC Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

The Importance of Being Iterative - Eliminating the Fear of Being Open

Spot.Us is about to hit the ground running. We hope to have something to show in mid-to-late October (assuming everything stays on schedule).

We've gotten here through a couple of stages. The Cliffs Note version of that is as follows.

Stage one: Narratives

After realizing Spot.Us would become a reality I got writing. Essentially this was a chance to toss ideas around and create a vision for the site.

The basic approach was: Define the types of users that would interact with spot.us and then write out their experience of the site - and what they'd see on each page. I wrote narratives for "Rita the Reader" "Johnny the Reporter" and "Harry the News Organization."

Stage two: Test and Design

This was when spot.us became more public. It included using cheap tools (a wiki and a blog) to try and get a caricature of how the final site would work. See "Starting Small and the Importance of Being Iterative" and "Growing a Community and the Importance of Being Iterative."

This included the SF Election Truthiness Campaign, Ethanol Investigation and more. If spot.us is "just an idea"  this was an attempt to see if it had merit.

The beauty of this phase: If I couldn't make it work using a wiki and a blog - I'd have some serious re-thinking to do.

Design: I've tried to be fairly public with the emerging designs. The process included working with two individuals who took my narratives from step one and the working examples from step two and giving it a user interface. Having the wiki up as a concrete example only helped.

Along the way - the designers (Jonathan and Anthony who are awesome) questioned my assumptions, brought fresh perspectives, etc - so the process itself was iterative and required daily check-ins and the ability to turn on a dime (change my mind about assumptions).

Stage Three: Development and scaling.

I'm working with HashRocket for development.

Their 3-2-1 process sounds like making a site is incredibly easy, but I suppose that's the marketing trick. Truth is - if you come to them without having gone through stage one and two above (each take anywhere from 1-3 months) they won't be able to help you. Or, what is probably more accurate, they'll help you - but your expectations must be lowered since you haven't set them in a deterministic fashion.

It should really be called 60, 59, 58, 57....1 - but they don't come in until the last moments - when all that's left is to turn the vision into a functional site.

As you can see - it's not dissimilar from Startup Weekend, which you can learn more about from Andrew Hyde.

With HashRocket step one was to translate the designs back into narratives, this time with a programmers perspective/language. Every button, action, view, must be turned into a "story."

Click To Play

Learning to work within restrictions

The hardest part of this process is leaving things on the cutting room floor. We've designed an intricate site with a lot of moving parts and a large scope. Of course I'm attached to every link, line and action we designed, but the fact is - you can only get so much code shipped in such a short period of time. I've had to scale back... at least for now.

The silver lining is that restrictions force one to cut out "niceties" and really focus in on the core functionality of your site. The question I'm forced to ask with every feature is: what is needed right now for launch? This restriction, although painful for me is probably very healthy. I won't suffer from mission creep in this early stage - I simply can't afford it.

Spot.Us is not waiting for a "ta-da" moment. The site will, hopefully, never be "finished." It will constantly evolve. That's partly why I feel comfortable leaving things on the cutting room table. As the site grows, I'll find out what users need/want and then I can easily look at the functions we left out to see if any answer those needs. But at least I'm not trying to prescribe or predict what users will want/need from the start. The fact is - you never know how people will engage and use your site. That's why you must release early and release often.

I'm sharply contrasting my experience building Spot.Us with Assignment Zero which many people will remember as a highly anticipated experiment in networked journalism from mid-2007.

While I'm trying to keep spot.us as an organically evolving project that is light with a reasonable turning radius, simply building Assignment Zero ballooned into a massive undertaking that was done behind closed doors (despite the best of intentions). When AZ launched it turned like a battleship. (I could talk for hours about my AZ experience. I look back at it fondly, but at the time between grad school and AZ - I was working REALLY long days)

Fear of being open disappears

I don't think fear was the reason why Assignment Zero was done behind closed doors and turned into a massive battleship that couldn't turn. It was more because we were trying to grasp at something that hadn't been attempted before. We had no clear vision of what would happen other than people collaborating on journalism. I hope projects like IAmNews can better capture it. My first advice: Don't prescribe the topic (which AZ did..."crowdsourcing"), stay open and fluid and remember technology comes second behind community organizing. I would love to see a successful example of networked journalism. To date - I'm left wanting.

On a regular basis I do hear people that suggest the reason they haven't gone public with their idea is the fear that somebody else will take it. Let that fear go. You can hoard your idea, spend all kinds of time and money trying to predict what users want - but until you freely reveal the idea, you'll never know. The idea might not have a market, might not have a good user-interface, might not be able to grow a community, etc, etc, etc. The only way to find out is to determine the path of least resistance and start.

As journalists become more and more independent - I hope this becomes a regular practice.

Learning How to be Agile

Blogging this week will be cut short.

I'm in the process of taking the designs of spot.us and turning them into a functional site.

What that looks like:

Click To Play

From Florida (where the developers are based) I'm going up to Ithaca for a quick symposium on, you guessed it, the future of journalism.

Very excited to see some friends there like.

Deanna Zandt, Amanda Michel, Linda Jue, Gail Robinson, Tracy Van Slyke and others.