New Features for Spot.Us!!!!
We have new features!!!!!
Anyone that has been following Spot.Us since we launched last November will know that I am a big believer in staying iterative. This means – launching with what you have, being transparent about what you hope to accomplish in the future – and letting people know when the site evolves.
We have lots of exciting news in relation to the journalism we are producing. But this post is pure tech (the former tech reporter in me loves this stuff).
Perhaps you want an RSS feed? Done!
Okay – an RSS feed for pitches should have been in the first version, I know. But why put out an RSS if you aren’t sure whether or not you’ll get more than five pitches? Since we’ve already funded 16 stories and have more coming in all the time – it is time to give you an RSS feed. You can find this RSS feed in our footer or at the top of our browse page.
More Dynamic Front Page
If you haven’t been to the front page of Spot.Us in awhile you should. We now swap out the front page videos to highlight different community members.
We also have super-sweet buttons that allow you to scroll through multiple pitches without having to hit “browse.” Totally a bell and whistle – but I love this one.
Almost ready: Spot.Us in YOUR Town.
At the top of Spot.Us we have a new horizontal rule that currently displays “All Networks” and “Bay Area.” At the moment you can only be on the “Bay Area” network – but you can start to see what is possible. That’s right – with the click of a button, we can start a new spot.us network. Nothing is being announced right now.
Join this reporting team.
This is perhaps the MOST exciting new feature. I am a big believer in participatory journalism. The public should be able to participate in multiple ways. Giving money is one way – but perhaps others will want to join the reporting team as well. Now they can make that known.
It will be up to the reporter whether or not they want to work collaboratively but if they do… they can. Investigative projects usually require a lot of people working together. Now you can do that through Spot.Us. Perhaps in a reporters initial pitch they can make a call for partners who will share in the monetary benefits.
An experienced journalist could partner with a more tech-savvy but greener young reporter. Or vice-versa.
Every pitch has a blog!!!!!
This is INCREDIBLY important to me and my philosophy that “journalism is a process – not a product.”
On spot.us so far you have been funding pitches and waiting for finished stories. Those are products. Now – you are funding a reporter who is sticking on a story and SHOWING you their worth in their pitches companion blogs.
Reporters can start blogging about their stories right away, assert themselves as authorities on a subject. If somebody joins their reporting team – it will be a group blog!!
Every blog has an RSS feed – so in some sense a reporter can just start reporting a topic and use Spot.Us purely as a tip-jar. As long as this is transparent in the pitch (that there is no final deliverable, it is just to raise some funds that support general coverage of a beat) – I think it is totally fine.
Having a blog attached to a pitch gives the reporters on Spot.Us exciting new potential and possiblities. I hope that every reporter turns into a beat blogger.
Advancing the Marketplace
Buttons that make it explicit what actions you can take if you are a news organization. You can show support as a news org, join the reporting team (provide editorial oversight so you know the story will work for your publication) provide half the money for a pitch and get first publishing rights or fully fund the pitch to reimburse the original donors and earn their love!
And believe it or not…..
We have MORE features that are 3/4ths finished and I’ll write about soon.
Related posts:
Nice work. The addition of networks is huge (biggest news, in my opinion). I noticed that the other day and thought, “Spot.us is getting ready to expand. Excellent.” Meant to ask you about it but you beat me to it.
Actually, a lot of this is could be really useful.
One technical nitpick: The RSS feed doesn’t have much in the way of metadata. There’s no feed-level title, link, description or anything else (I’ve been doing a bunch of feed parsing projects lately, so I notice these things reflexively now). Don’t know how hard that is to fix. It’s a minor thing, for now. Everything else looks great.
Great to see the continuing innovation and looking forward to the expansion of the network to other communities.
One question & one comment:
Q: How does compensation work for a “reporting team?” Is it left up to the lead reporter to decide if they want to share funds with rest of team?
Comment: Blogs on pitches are a nice way to “get the backstory” but I’d still like to see a specific “deliverable” associated with funding. Without a deliverable, e.g. a finished story, it becomes very hard for me to assess and promote the result of my funding. I think most people have a sense of what counts as a high quality investigative report because we have the existing news organizations as a benchmark. Blogging doesn’t have the same notion of a shared standard. For example, would we expect every blog post funded by Spot.us to be fact checked and edited for clarity?
Once a story is funded, reported, and published, I could imagine a “maintenance fund” where people fund updates to the original story. This might be especially useful for items with ongoing community interest, such as the story about Muni. 6 months or a year from now, readers will want to know about the current state of Muni, rather than reading a “dated” story that’s no longer relevant.
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[...] 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 [...]
[...] 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 [...]