The Pacific Garbage Patch: Published
Today in the New York Times science section you’ll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific Garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This piece would not have been possible if Spot.Us and a community of over 100 people hadn’t come together to fund her trip. It is a great case study for Spot.Us, arguably the best of the 40+ projects we’ve undertaken in the past year because despite its ambition and attention has gone off without a hitch. It involved almost every facet of how I imagined Spot.Us could work and so I’d like to walk through how it came about from start to finish.
Below you will find.
• How did this come about?
• The connection with the Times.
• What all this represented in a nutshell.
• The Real Test: Fundraising
• The unfolding story – Lindsey’s live reporting
• Conclusion/What can be improved.
How did this even start?
I first met Lindsey Hoshaw speaking at Stanford’s journalism school about Spot.Us. Our first meeting was uneventful. The only impression I was left with from her was her time in Los Angeles which gave us something to connect on.
A few months later, however, Lindsey contacted me about the Pacific Garbage patch. It was a story I knew of through Manuel Maqueda who himself has undertaken recent reporting efforts around plastic in the ocean.
Lindsey explained that she had been given a seat on the boat with Captain Moore, the man who first discovered the Pacific Garbage Patch. In reaching out to the science editor at the NY Times they were interested in the story. There was, however, one giant hurdle. She needed to pay her own way on the trip and getting to the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn’t cheap.
The connection with the Times
Where many pitches go awry this one excelled and for that I must give praise to the NY Times. In most Spot.Us experiences the larger a news organization the slower it is to get approval to try something with Spot.Us because of how radically different our approach to journalism is. In past attempts with main stream organizations I’ve sat in countless meetings only to spin wheels. Those experiences are actually the inspiration for this blog post “News Organizations In a Battle Against Inertia.”
My hat is off the NY Times. They interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup. I spent half a day at the Times talking with various decision makers who agreed to entertain the idea further if we drafted a pitch. Once the pitch was approved all we had to do was make it live and let them know. I am still in awe of that experience. It contrasts with everything I’ve experienced with other larger media organizations and it a testament to why the NY Times is not just the paper of record – but also leading the charge into the digital future.
What all this represented in a nutshell.
A freelancer and a news organization wanted to work together but understandably needed to grease the wheels with some money. This is not uncommon. News organizations have a shrinking staff and budget. They must rely more on freelancers but also don’t want to burn through the entire freelance budget on a single story. This is one reason why we are seeing less original long form reporting. Spot.Us acted as the grease. I hope we can continue to grease the wheels between freelancers and the public or other news organizations.
The Real Test: Fundraising
When launched this pitch was the most ambitious fundraising goal Spot.Us had ever undertaken. I am happy to say that a new project with McSweeney’s and the Public Press may surpass it. Fundraising is never easy but a few things favored this pitch.
1. Lindsey is an ideal Spot.Us reporter. She is passionate and unafraid to show it. Her desire to report on this topic pours out of her in the Spot.Us video pitch. I only wish every Spot.Us reporter could show their interest in a story like her. Perhaps in the future the “video pitch” will be required for a Spot.Us pitch. Furthermore, Lindsey was unafraid to reach out to her network of friends, family and social networking sites to ask for support.
2. The NY Times followed up our initial efforts with a story of their own, “Many Checkbooks One Newspaper.” The piece by Clark Hoyt examined the growing role of public support in journalism but highlighted Lindsey’s pitch. I would never speak on behalf of the NY Times but I like to think this was their way of putting out a test: “if we ask, will you give?” The answer was a big “yes” from a variety of folks for a multitude of reasons. Some donated in support of the NY Times. Others because they knew of and want to know more about the garbage patch. Perhaps others just because of how fresh Spot.Us seemed and perhaps others still because they connected with Lindsey as an individual
Regardless, we raised 6k on Spot.Us before I could even go in and change the fundraising goal to 10k (the amount Lindsey truly needed) and we used Facebook Causes to get the remainder.
The unfolding story
Once funding was secured Lindsey didn’t rest. She blogged regularly throughout her experience – including while on the boat using a satellite phone to get online. She saved her best photos for the NY Times upon her return, but she did not ignore the interest of people that supported her trip. She kept them involved and engaged. The best wrap-up of her posts from the ship can be found here.
The best pitches on Spot.Us are those that treat their pitches as an unfolding story. KALW’s “Crime Courts and Communities” pitch is another great example of this ‘beat blogging’ approach.
Conclusion and what can be improved.
Spot.Us needs a new design. There, I said it! (We’ve gotten started).
We need to express our mission clearer, improve functionality/features of the site (new designs coming soon). We are FAR from perfect. This is not a post to simply pat us on the back and claim/whine: “if only more reporters were as open as Lindsey or more news organizations as willing as the NY Times Spot.Us would be the best thing since the Walter Lippmann.” That sentiment would not only be naive it would shift the burden of improvement from Spot.Us to the journalism culture.
Spot.Us does represent a fundamental shift from traditional journalism culture and while that does pose a hurdle for us, it is something we must overcome by highlighting exemplar projects like this and figuring out how they can be repeated. With that in mind – this case study would be incomplete without the following section.
We need.
1. Other ways to support reporting: There are other ways to support reporters beyond whipping out a wallet. Distributed reporting can be huge and Spot.Us should dabble in this. Perhaps we will shift from “community funded reporting” to “community powered reporting” or “community supported reporting.”
2. Facebook, Twitter and more. The NY Times article would not have had a big impact without Twitter.
3. A clearer way to articulate what is going on with every pitch to any visitor that comes to our site.
4. Your ideas!
Finally
A big thank you from Lindsey
Related posts:
- A Photographer’s Eye: Preparing for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Trip
- A Story for the NYTimes – The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
- A Great Pacific Garbage Discussion
- Join the Garbage Patch Discussion Tomorrow on BlogTalkRadio!
- Dissecting the Garbage Patch Reaches 5k. Reporting this Weekend on a Conference
Hi David,
We met at the Columbia J-school where we were co-panelists in 2008.
Congratulations for this achievement! In the life of an organization there are always milestones you feel you have overcome after huge efforts and pain. You are now there and you are already setting another milestone with new stories to fund with your great and visionary concept.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and hope to see you soon (maybe in Perugia, Italy)!
Adriano
[...] a post at the Spot.us blog, founder David Cohn explains how the partnership came to fruition: My hat is off to the NY Times. [...]
Congrats on making the story happen. I would like to make this story one of the case studies my press ethics class considers at NYU next May. Wondered if you or the NYT had any guidelines in place concerning the amounts or who could fund Hoshaw’s piece? Was there any amount or potential funder you would turn down? Would you have taken money from Exxon? The Plastics Council? I see most of the donors were in $20 to $50 range. But one was for $500 and another for $699–does transparency require more than just knowing their names?
Great news, much congrats.
Thanks to spot.us we in Amsterdam – the Netherlands were inspired to make a similar project: The Sochi Project, a 5 year long journalistic project around Sochi, Russia. A few months into the project already 175 people are supporting us. We collected almost 12.000 euros with it for our grand project. Come check it out on our website The Sochi Project, but foremost – thanks for the inspiration, I hope you’ll be inspired by us as well !
Congratulations Dave and Lindsey, and thanks for sharing the story behind the story. Very interesting to see how it all unfolded from start to finish. And a NYT byline? A pretty sweet debut for Lindsey and spot.us.
[...] logró publicar su historia en NYTimes (con galería de fotos incluida). En el blog oficial cuentan la historia en detalle del interesante recorrido del artículo. El experimento comienza a darles resultados. [...]
[...] by Lindsay, and despite the criticisms of the outcome, a great effort by Spot.us as well. Dave Cohn describes the genesis of the project and the process it went through, as well as some of the lessons learned. [...]
How best to present on the Web?…
Lindsey Hoshaw, ayoung journo, travels out to a Pacific Ocean garbage patch. Blogs about it over a period of weeks. Her travel is funded by Spot.us, which crowdsources funding for worthy journalistic ventures. Spot.us does a deal with the New York…
Dave,
To echo Christine Gorman’s question: The NYT’s piece (link below) on Hoshow’s pitch appeal to spot.us for freelance expenses for the story states that the NT agreed to work with spot.us after confirming that spot.us has in place “safeguards against special interests hijacking a story.”
What safeguards, specifically, are in place? Is there some place on the spot.us site you could point me to that clearly outlines these safeguards and addresses concerns publishers and/or those donating might have about this issue? And if not–since you asked for suggestions for the site–I absolutely think adding such info. is crucial in garnering additional support for and increasing understanding of this fairly new model of funding journalism.
I enjoyed Hoshow’s blog and NYT’s piece. Great job for helping make it happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19pubed.html
@Christine and @M
Sorry for taking so long to respond to the questions.
1. So one of the safegaurds: We actually limit how much an individual can donate. If one person wanted to donate 3k or something like that – the site wouldn’t let them. It requires a group of people. This way the reporter is not beholden to any individual donor.
2. Sources cannot donate and people who donate cannot be sources.
3. Would we take money from Exxon or Plastics Council? Again: We limit how much any individual can donate – and I stress individual. The only time organizations have contributed to spot.us are news organizations that publish the content.
On Spot.Us when people register we ask for first and last name. Somebody could put their first name as Exxon and the last name as Inc. or something like that I suppose. If it really was an individual – then I’d consider that more of an annonymous donation than a donation from the company.
If for some strange reason a company did donate to a pitch: I don’t know. We will cross that bridge when we get there. At the moment however it hasn’t happened.
Does transparency require knowing more than just their names? Well – as Gorman pointed out – we put their names and how much they donated. They can fill out their profiles more if they want – but I don’t think we can or should require people to fill out survey’s about their jobs, date of birth, mother’s maiden name etc before they donate
Best (and keep the questions coming).
[...] The Pacific Garbage Patch: Published [...]
[...] experimental de “crowd-funded journalism”, ou seja, jornalismo financiado pelas massas. Aqui [...]
[...] founder David Cohn gave kudos to the New York Times blog post, saying the paper acted like a “lean and mean startup” and that in the past he had spun his [...]
[...] The Pacific Garbage Patch: Published | Spot Us – "Community Funded Reporting" (tags: spot.us nyt crowdfunding casestudy) [...]
If people used biodegradable industrial supplies this problem wouldn’t be nearly as big. It would still be there, but much less severe.