Digital News Journalist

About Barbara Raab Barbara Raab is a senior news writer and web editor at NBC News, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Crowdfunding, while not a tool in the technical sense, may turn out to be an indispensable business tool in the new ecosystem of journalism.

While the idea of getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project is not new — charities do it, political campaigns do it — some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs, as Mashable recently observed, are starting to apply the same crowdfunding concept to the news.

One of them is David Cohn at Spot.Us, a Bay Area-based project that’s using crowdfunding to support investigative journalism. Members of the public provide tips and suggestions for stories; an interested journalist crafts a pitch; the pitch is then presented back to the public for funding. Once enough money is raised and the story is completed, it is offered or sold for publication. (Read more about how Spot.Us works here, see the stories it has reported here, and watch Cohn explain his mission here.)

Spot.Us crowdfunded reporting made its way recently into the pages of the New York Times. The story,  “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash,” by Lindsay Hoshaw, described a a plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. It included a photo slideshow, and a note at the end that “travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us.”

As the first such high-profile partnership of its kind, the article has garnered a lot of attention among new-media observers. Below are links to some of the discussion that ensued online.

Even before it was clear that Hoshaw and Spot.Us would raise the money necessary to report the story, the Times’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote about the newspaper’s experimental relationship with Spot.Us in a column called “One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks.”

“To some, this is exploitation — the mighty New York Times forcing a struggling journalist to beg with a virtual tin cup,” Hoyt wrote.

But Hoshaw does not think so. To her, it is an opportunity she cannot pass up — a story she has long dreamed of, and a chance for a byline in The Times. To David Cohn, the founder of the nonprofit Spot.Us, it is a way for the public to commission journalism that it wants. For The Times, it is another step into a new world unthinkable even a few years ago.

The day Hoshaw’s story was published, Cohn, in his blog, called it “a great case study for Spot.Us, arguably the best of the 40+ projects we’ve undertaken in the past year,” and praised the Times for acting “as if they were a lean and mean startup,” in contrast to the frustrating experiences he’d had with other news organizations.

But over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Megan Garber trashed the Times’s garbage patch story, saying it failed to deliver the “human connection” promised in the pitch, had too much of a “could-be-done-from anywhere” type of reporting rather than the first-hand sense of being out at sea, and “could have been much, much better.” Garber wrote that she wished the Times article had more closely resembled the “good stuff” that appeared in Hoshaw’s personal blog of real-time reports, filed during the time she spent in the Pacific researching the story.

Here’s Lindsay Hoshaw’s response to CJR, in which she acknowledged that her blogging-at-sea had indeed given readers a richer story. “I wrote what I believed the Times wanted,” she said, “though they never specified the type of article they expected.”

Bill Mitchell of Poynter also analyzed the Spot.Us/New York Times experiment, as did Mashable.

And it was Scott Rosenberg who pointed out that “The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — [Hoshaw's] blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.Us model.”

All told, it was a spirited discussion about an experiment in what could be one of the ways forward for journalism.