Defining "Representative Journalism"
I’m on the “board of advisers” for Representative Journalism and Leonard Witt, who coined the phrase, is also on the board of advisers for Spot Us.
So – I thought I’d take a post to look at how Witt defines Representative Journalism. It is very much in-tune with Spot Us. In fact, whenever I explain Spot Us – I also bring up RepJ as an experiment playing in the same space. In my mind the only real difference between RepJ and Spot Us is the scope of what we are trying to raise money for. More on that below.
The quick and dirty definition of RepJ (and Leonard Witt may chime in if I get it wrong): If you have a “community” (loosely defined) of 1,000 people who each donate $100 a year (that’s only $8.30 a month) that’s enough to hire a journalist or two to provide the news and information needs of that community for one year.
This is very similar to how I often explain Spot Us: “If you get 100 people to donate $20, that’s enough to hire an investigative journalist to report on a topic that is important to those 100 people.”
The main difference between Spot Us and RepJ is between funding a beat and funding an individual story. Now, obviously it’s good to think big. And I do see advantages to funding a beat rather than a story. As I see it the two big advantages are….
A) You can do breaking news stories.
B) Since beats are broad like “education” or “the environment” the specific stories aren’t known yet – which means accusations that money is influencing content are less potent (once again, I must point out my response to this innate fear from journalists).
But – as with all things there is no black and white answer. The downsides to funding a beat as I see it are…
A) Less connection to what people are funding ie: the value proposition is watered down. Journalism is still a finished product that is handed over and the public is less involved.
B) More susceptible to glossy coverage. Journalists will still be chasing views – to ensure their readers are happy and they get more subscribers.
Another recent example of funding a beat is from the American News Project.
Side Note: (What I love about the American NewsProject is how simple it is. Create a new page, use Chip-In and you are off. Since Spot Us will start in San Francisco – when people in other cities tell me they want to experiment in community funded reporting – I point to this example and say: Pick your weapon of choice. If I were a freelance journalist I’d use ThePoint.com or Fundable to pitch stories to the public on a daily basis. But I digress.)
So why is Spot Us focusing on funding individual stories?
The first reason is simple – now is the time for crawling. When we have that down, let’s talk about walking, running, etc. I would love to build Spot Us into a platform that could support journalists covering beats for periods of time – but I want to grow into that. I think it would be forced at this early stage.
Second: Taking notes on Kiva.org, DonorsChoose and other micro-financing sites there are some common themes. One is that the donor feels a connection to the person receiving the money and the story that is being told. On Kiva.org you see pictures of the person in the third world country and you learn about what they want to do with the money you will lend them, etc. That personal connection is lost when funding a beat.
Third: Funding a beat is not at all dissimilar from funding NPR, PBS or a large organization. In an online environment you have the ability to focus in on specific granularities – but large nonprofit news organizations still ask for charitable donations for their brand. When donating to NPR – you are essentially saying two things 1. I believe journalism is an important and integral part of our democracy and 2. NPR is a news organization I trust to cover important issues.
Those are both great things to agree to – but they are incredibly broad.
To donate to a specific story you don’t need to overtly believe in the greater mission of journalism. You will still be taking part in that greater mission – but that doesn’t have to be your motivating principle. Donating to a specific story means you don’t have to trust anyone’s broader news judgment to determine what stories should be covered – you are deciding for yourself. Of course – you still have to trust the individual to cover that story well – but that is another caveat which applies to everyone.
Again: I don’t think there is a right or wrong approach. From my point of view – the only wrong move to make is not to try anything at all. So I point out Lenn’s Representative Journalism because I see his organization as a “brother in arms” to the same cause as Spot Us. I just wanted to use this post to have an open conversation with Lenn – explain my thinking and approach to community funded reporting on a story by story approach and wish us both luck.
ONWARD!!!!!
Related posts:
I can envision some kind of middle ground here.
Few stories worth covering are, in fact, one story. Instead of funding what comes to a single magazine-length piece, what about funding a series of articles, with a blog behind it.
Keep things temporary, and it retains the advantages of funding a story, but stretch it out to catch some of the benefits of a beat.
I wonder if the focus on “if we get n people to chip in $x each we can do ok” is wrong.
Investigative reporting is hard (and expensive), and often takes years to generate enough of a story to make an impact. If you rely on direct funding of that, you’re going to have 1000 people waiting a long time for one thing – without much in the way of filler in the middle to keep a community building.
If you instead take the perspective that one of the reasons that community journalism doesn’t have much in the way of investigative reporting is that the community journalists don’t have the tools at hand to do the work efficiently – then you start down a path that tries to push out data driven analysis, efficient mapping tools, other kinds of systems where lots of stuff is pulled together from a bunch of sources and then integrated into something that tells more of a story.
If you google for
scio safe water google maps
you’ll see (in part) some work a friend here in Ann Arbor has done with the help of some of the local GIS / neogeography community to track groundwater pollution. To me this looks like community investigative journalism mixed with advocacy, but the key insight is tool building is a critical part of converting people from interested to effective.
Hi David:
I don’t think putting the tin cup out will be enough. My Representative Journalism idea always looked for having a community — geographic or of interest — that craves news and information. Then provide a journalist who in turn provides the informational glue to help hold that community together. I am looking to take your structure and overlap it with our communities. Maybe we can even do it right here in full view.
I think think Spot Us is an interesting concept and will probably find its niche. But this proxy-type approach has no appeal to me.
This blogger has a nice round-up of all the newsroom layoffs this week:
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/06/death-of-almost-1000-cuts.html
The market is being flooded with skilled reporters and editors. What will happen now?
I tend to believe that the newspaper industry isn’t so much as decaying but reproducing.
This talent that is being shed, and that includes the many journalism students with no entry path, won’t dissipate.
This talent will write neighborhood and niche topic blogs that will develop into their own local journalism vehicles.
The news model will resemble the 1880s when numerous newspapers competed for readers. As in that time, numerous local blogs are competing with readers and they are gradually becoming more professional. Competition is beginning to drive quality.
The most talented journalist are also the most independent and resourceful. They will look for paths that provide the maximum amount of freedom to practice their craft. Anyone who enters journalism because they believe in its importance, are driven by the need to discover fact and find truth, won’t give so easily.
A trained and motivated journalist is a force of nature and they will move to models that maximize their freedom.
Lenn
I think we will have to do it in full view. That’s why I started the wiki.spot.us – granted it’s not the prettiest thing to look at, it is totally functional. But I also agree “putting out a tin can” isn’t enough: There has to be a community that craves the info and the reporter has to be the glue for that community to get the info they want.
To Kob: I 100% – agree with your comment. I think we are going to see more and more niche publications – bloggers who are competing for readers. The problem is – Google advertising won’t support somebody doing journalism full time. Which means now you need either (a. Somebody doing it in their spare time who has another job or (b. Somebody selling premium ads.
If (a. Quality suffers. If (b. You now need to support the advertising salesman and ensure that you don’t offend advertisers. It’s no different than a newspaper now (albeit smaller). Finally: You will always be chasing the page views.
Spot.Us is essentially trying to ask: Can we support a journalist without advertising – but based on the quality of his/her work alone.
Still: I think we have a similar vision of the future for journalism and I appreciate your comments.
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Fascinating experiment, and I definitely applaud efforts to democratize the funding of news reports. Practically, I wonder what systems you have in place for feedback and response from the donors post publication.
Are you viewing donors as customers who should expect some measure of satisfaction once a service has been rendered?
Do folks get their money back if they are unsatisfied with the finished product?
(I’ve worked for newspapers 16 years, and I’m glad I haven’t had refund money based on my performance on a couple of stories I’ve worked on!)
Best of luck!
I’m one of the participants in the RepJ project with Len. It’s our 3-person blog/podcast, Locally Grown, that will host the RepJ journalist(s).
I’m increasingly drawn to a contribution model in which the town, in effect, funds the relationship with one or more reporters AND the online environment in which they operate.
The online community is what offers the journalists the place to build this relationship and makes it MUCH more likely that the town will continue to support them.
Why?
Because I believe that an independent RepJ journalist looking to be funded by a community will have to behave in a very different way than a traditional journalist. Collaboration and transparency will be key, IMHO, and both will be much easier to engage in within the context of a vibrant online community.
‘Nuff said for now… specifics coming soon!
These are all great comments and I really appreciate them. I agree with a lot of what is above: I earnestly believe that this notion of community funded reporting – whether done in the style of RepJ or Spot Us needs to be explored as much as possible.
I almost see part of my job as highlighting some of the other great efforts out there – like RepJ and ReelChanges.org.
So let’s all push forward together.
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