Homicide Watch reaches fundraising goal, but how viable is its business model long-term?

Homicide Watch | Kickstarter | New York Times
With just three days left in its month-long Kickstarter campaign, Homicide Watch has reached the goal of $40,000 in pledges from more than 1,000 people to sustain the site for another year.

The Kickstarter campaign crossed its fundraising goal.

Since its launch in 2010, Homicide Watch has used a database as well as news articles to track homicide cases and victims in Washington. It was run solely by a two-person team, Laura and Chris Amico. The new funding will pay stipends for a “student reporting lab” of interns to run the innovative news site, as Laura Amico becomes a Nieman-Berkman Fellow. Amico writes:

Chris and I are working hard to get the student reporting lab up and running just as quickly as possible. We’ve reached out to some of the local journalism instructors we know already and have asked for recommendations. We’ll be doing a larger push to the schools this week. We’ll be going directly to students, too; later today we hope to post information for students seeking positions with Homicide Watch DC.

The campaign has benefited from strong publicity in the past month, but David Carr’s New York Times column this Sunday may have put it over the top. The campaign crossed the goal Sunday night.

We did it!

— Laura Amico (@homicidewatch) September 10, 2012

We are amazed to witness your generosity in helping to support young journalists and provide meaningful coverage of violent crime.

— Laura Amico (@homicidewatch) September 10, 2012

Carr’s column looks at Homicide Watch’s difficult quest for funding and suggests these innovative efforts are a better investment in the future than simply paying newspaper reporters’ salaries:

Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots like Homicide Watch and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media? I am all for putting more reporting boots on the ground, but the existential dilemma confronting media will require new answers, not stopgap funds for legacy approaches. (I write these words knowing that I may well eat them someday. I wonder if I would be so picky about the source of funds if I were the one being financed.)

It’s certainly good news that Homicide Watch reached its goal before this Thursday’s deadline, but now a new clock starts ticking. The $40,000 is not a sustainable endowment, just a stopgap to fund intern staffing for one year.

Admire Homicide Watch. But lost in all the hype today is a kickstarter effort to train 5 young journalists to use a failed hyperlocal model

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) September 9, 2012

@aschweig out of money. now a crime reporting training tool. Still no viable model or light after end of kickstarter money.

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) September 9, 2012

Calling Homicide Watch “a failed hyperlocal model” is so stupid it gives me a ha ha.

— William M. Hartnett (@wmhartnett) September 10, 2012

As if the crime reporters at any news organization produce work that pays their own way.

— William M. Hartnett (@wmhartnett) September 10, 2012

It’s simply a better way of covering crime, and DC newsrooms are too dumbshit set in their ways see that and do anything about it.

— William M. Hartnett (@wmhartnett) September 10, 2012

@rajunarisetti It’s not so much a failed model as not-a-model: no revenue is no model.

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) September 9, 2012

By this time next year, the site will have to develop a new funding source, such as licensing its technology to other news organizations (which it is now doing) and/or aggressively ramping up advertising.

Ads have been a difficult sell next to homicide coverage, but the Kickstarter campaign shows promise for the future of advertising on the site. Twenty-five donors have pledged $125 each in exchange for a one-month “sponsorship message” on the site, and one donor pledged $1,000 to sponsor the site’s annual year in review feature.

A small start, but success with these initial sponsors may open the door to more in the future.

Earlier: Homicide Watch established news beats as databases (Poynter) | Homicide Watch uses clues from site search queries to ID victim (Poynter) | Q&A: The Amicos on data journalism (O’Reilly Strata) | Homicide Watch seeks a new home in a newsroom (Nieman Lab)