The numbers don’t add up to much so far. In its first ten months, the Spot.Us crowd-funding site has raised $40,000 from 800 people to support 30 stories.
But the expansion to Los Angeles that the site is announcing today in partnership with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, coupled with lessons learned so far, suggest that the more than $340,000 invested in the project by the Knight Foundation will turn out to be money well spent.
My biggest hope for Spot.Us: Gain an understanding of what people value about local news in the public interest — and how and why they decide to support, with their own money, some enterprises that they value.
In fact, that’s my biggest hope for all the experiments in funding local news underway around the country, from the stunning online annual fee of $345 imposed by the Newport Daily News to the nonprofit model of VoiceofSanDiego.org (join a live chat with Voice editor Andrew Donohue at 1 p.m. today).
It’s also the topic of my four-month fellowship at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy: a framework for sustaining local news in the public interest.
I’m only a couple of weeks into my time in Cambridge, but I bet that whatever I come up with will involve a hybrid approach to staffing, funding and other dimensions of the news enterprise.
The hybrid approach — Spot.Us’ alliance with the Annenberg School — is one of the aspects of its expansion that’s especially interesting. With many journalism programs thriving despite journalism’s hazy economic future, experiments like this and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University will be critical.
Whoever is producing the journalism, the funding problem ultimately turns on what the audience values. I put the value question to Spot.Us founder David Cohn in a telephone conversation last week.
“There’s a disconnect in value between how the reporter and the public see the value of the work,” he told me. “The value people get from having donated is not so much the finished content. It’s more about feeling a part of something. It’s like the donation is more like a statement of value. … I value the idea of good reporting and I value the environment, for example. It’s not so much about the story as it is about having this affiliation.”
That sounded right to me, especially because I was unable to recall just what story prompted me to donate $25 to Spot.Us last December. (My contribution raised a separate issue about whether I should have made a donation to an organization that I would subsequently write about, but set that aside for now.)
The question at hand is what motivated me to part with the $25. It clearly was not my interest in the story about Bay Area journalism that was ultimately posted to the site (but not read by me until I tracked it down this week). My donation had more to do with the value I attach to important news that might otherwise go unreported.
As Mike Masnick points out in this valuable discussion choreographed by Mark Glaser at MediaShift, though, people value all sorts of things they never decide to pay for.
Which leads me to the two core questions I want to answer:
- What is it, actually, that people value about the news we keep telling them is so important to life in a democracy?
- What motivates people to put up money — in the form of subscriptions, donations or any other mechanism — for news they value?
The two questions are obviously related, but solving that second puzzle will involve a lot more than simply answering the first.
In addition to pursuing those two questions with the people practicing (and paying for) journalism, I’ll do my best to understand what books such as “Nudge” and “Predictably Irrational” have to offer about the decisions people make about paying for news.
I expect to spend a lot of time at Harvard listening, including a brown bag lunch today, when the guy at the head of the table will be Clay Shirky.
Hat tip for the alert to the MediaShift discussion — as well as those two new books on my shelf — from Julia Kamin, a student at the Kennedy School of Government who is working as a research assistant on my Shorenstein paper.
