Spent a few minutes at NetSquared today chatting with David Cohn, whom I first met in person a year ago at Personal Democracy Forum, but it seems like I bump into him at every conference these days (at NewsTools at Yahoo! earlier this month and then at Innovation Journalism at Stanford last week). As I recently mentioned, David snagged a Knight News Challenge grant to develop a public-funded investigative and community journalism project.
David will be unveiling the project in the months ahead — it’s still in its very early formative stages — but here’s the outline, in David’s words. (I’ll give the site a deeper look when it beta-launches.)
Project: "Spot Us" (www.spot.us). Or if the .us thing weirds you out try: Spotreporting.com or Spotjournalism.com
Spot Us is "community funded reporting." If you are familiar with Kiva.org or DonorsChoose, I say: "it’s that for reporters."
If you are not familiar with Kiva.org or DonorsChoose, I say: "If 50 people put down $40, that’s enough to hire a reporter to look into their local school district/hospital or whatever issue those 50 agree is important and should be covered."
The question: Is local journalism a social good that people would be willing to donate toward?
I will be starting in the SF Bay Area (think Craigslist), so if you
know people (reporters or not, although reporters are especially sought after), please send them to Spot.Us. Contacts: I’m on the web. Personal blog is: www.digidave.org.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Thanks J.D.
I hope to start blogging at IdeaLab soon. Spot Us is in its formative stages – but I hope to move out of that and into a production phase very soon. But it will be iterative and somewhat public. So – if you want to see a sausage being made – tune in.