Alex Gamela talks to Dave Cohn, founder of the non-profit, crowdfunding journalism project Spot.us, winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, and a suggested new model for the news business. On the eve of launching the Spot.us official website, Dave told OJB how he is putting his ideas into practice, and his views on the current state of journalism.

Four months after winning the KNC grant, Dave Cohn is a happy man. He started with a wiki where he presented and tested the different sides to his project, and he quickly managed to fund three stories. Now it is on its way to fund a fourth one. All of this even before having an official website.

The way it works is quite simple: someone – a journalist, a citizen, a community – pitches a subject to be investigated journalistically; the story is then open for funding, and whoever wants can contribute with a small sum; if the target amount is reached, a journalist takes the story on; finally it gets published.

So far this model has worked well:

“We’ve raised 3000 dollars from about 100 donors, about an average of 33 dollars each.

“It’s like digital poetry”

Dave Cohn has been doing his share on networked journalism for a while now, working with the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis.

He has strong beliefs on the possibilities that the web brings to journalism, the immense power of communities, and also in a change of attitude on the journalists part.

“Journalists and journalism right now is a diaspora, we’re sort of been kicked out of the homeland of newspapers, and we need to figure out where we can go from here”.

So he has been thinking about all this for a long time now, but the concept underlying Spot.us is rather recent for him: “I’ve been working on Spot.us as an idea for little over a year.”

Although it sounds simple, the task of building a platform has been complex, with all its nuts and bolts.

“Building a website in general is complex, and this is also building an organization. I have to remember this is a non-profit, so there’s a lot of framework behind that, to which I’m new to”.

But Dave Cohn is enthusiastic about it:

“I love every minute of it, because it’s like digital poetry. I have the opportunity to build this website as i envisioned it, and granted there are things that come up along the way that force me to put out some fires and do certain things, but they’re all part of this process, of , again, digital poetry.”

And who can participate? Spot.us “is not a news organization”, so he says he’s not considering hiring anyone. It’s “a marketplace, a platform that independent journalists can use to crowdfund for themselves”.

“It’s for freelance journalists, and it works on a pitch by pitch basis. We encourage everybody to do a pitch, everyone who wants to do this professionally.”

However, he recently announced that he is looking for journalists and communities to work with him.

The project has been promoted in two distinct ways: one, more traditional with the help of a marketing company. The other, based on a grassroots approach to the organized communities.

“It’s not really about marketing, but partnering with people that already have communities organized, and say: Look, you are a community, you have invested interested on something, you want something covered by a professional journalist, what is it? Lets find out what it is and how a professional journalist can cover it”

And what is Dave Cohn’s role in all of this?

“I’m an entrepreneur, strictly interested in the issues of journalism. What I’m passionate about and what motivates me is figuring out how journalism can continue to thrive, despite the death of its institutions. So I’m a journalist/entrepreneur in that sense where I’m trying to figure out how journalism can rethink itself and redefine itself so it can continue.”

Crowdfunding as a new business model

One of the most discussed issues on the new media blogosphere is how to find a sustainable business model for the news industry. Spot.us’ crowdfunding model raised some doubts over the possibility that groups with their own agenda might fund specific stories, thus skewing the journalistic goal of the project, in contrast with traditional media that appeared as the gold standard.

Dave Cohn is very clear about this:

“There’s no such thing as clean money. It’s a myth that newspapers’ money is clean. And anybody who is working in journalism knows the story of a publisher who killed an investigation because it would have threatened some advertising dollars.”

He argues that the process must be transparent every step of the way, and show “where the money comes from, limit donations.”

Besides, the names and the reputation of the professionals involved are at stake – the journalist who proposed to write the story, the editor, and the media who will publish it.

Cohn believes the role of the community is crucial, and everything changed when people got access to the new web tools:

“Maybe in the 1960′s community organizing meant gathering a bunch of people picketing, but now young people when they want to do community organizing they create media: they create a YouTube video, or a Facebook cause.

“And I think more and more you will get successful citizen journalism projects, and they’re usually led by civic leaders or community leaders, who have taken responsibility and said: look, this is an issue of my community, how can I help benefit it? Well I’ll take it online, organize online, by making media”.

One of the major shifts in the news paradigm is the growing need – and ability – that people have to claim issues that are close to them in the news agenda. And this raised questions about the effectiveness and the role of journalism, and how it served that need.

“People have serious information needs,” and “that’s what journalism should be: serving the information needs of people.

“It’s not producing a newspaper. A newspaper is a packaged product that is delivered to your door. What journalism does is to inform people, and i think people will always want information, especially about their local community.”

And now people can demand for the information that affects them and their communities, and in depth. Now that the communities know they can have their voice heard, nothing will ever be the same.

“As long as we are tied to geographical locations we’re going to want to know what’s going on in our geographical location. So that is not going to disappear, people want in depth stuff.”

Journalism on the spot

Dave Cohn has an analogy to explain what has changed in the relationship between users and media.

“If you walked into a restaurant and the waiter told you what you were going to eat for dinner, you’d walk right out. But that’s the way news has traditionally been served.

“When you look at it historically, we came out of a time where it was top-down communication, so that made sense: here’s your news, here’s what’s important.”

Now the people can order the information they want off the vast menu called the web, and the definition of what is news or not is no longer decided by a restricted number of people.

“Traditionally, 0.001% of the population determined the news agenda, and they were called editors, and the reason they were able to determine the news agenda is because they were the only ones with a freelance budget.”

Cohn has written and debated profusely about what needs to be done to improve and renew the trust in traditional media. And to him, background changes must occur.

“The way news media are structured need to be rethought or re-tooled, so it can respond more, and be more open, but it’s not their fault, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way those organizations are structured, because it came out of this history, and it literally is history now, what worked 30 years ago doesn’t work anymore.”

The trust relationship between audience and journalists isn’t rock-steady. I asked Dave Cohn if the view of the world given by journalists wasn’t too narrow. He says it’s not about the journalists.

“I strongly believe that journalists in general, when you talk to them one on one are in general really good people, and they have strong beliefs. They’re doing what they’re doing because they believe in it, and they’re passionate about it. Individual reporters and journalists, their view is not too narrow.

“I think the problem comes in that, the institutions they’re part of – the newspapers or the news organizations – are structured in a top-down way, where orders come from the top, individuals can’t make necessarily decisions on the fly, and that caused them to be somewhat narrow, or unable to pivot rapidly or in response to the community, that now has a voice in result of the internet.”

Although he is critic about the slow evolution of traditional media, Dave Cohn is not extreme in his opinions.

“I think a lot of times in this traditional or new media debate we cast things in black and white a little too often. It’s always more complicated than that.”

The future and some advice

For now, Spot.us is based in the San Francisco Bay area. But Dave Cohn is interested to expand his project to other regions and cities, like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, while he is probing the acceptance the project might have in other countries.

“The web code application is open source, so if you want to use it and start it in your own country or in your own city, I would be so happy and honoured. I want people to take this, it’s open source for a reason, take it and use it in your own city.”

And to those who want to start their own ventures?

“Start small, start realistic, and iterate.”

He reinforces the idea that the true power is not in technology, but in people:

“Community trumps technology any day of the week.”

That is the true spirit behind Dave Cohn’s work. He leaves one final piece of advice, both for journalists and entrepreneurs:

“Be passionate.”

And he knows what he is talking about.

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“This book is my manifesto for the media as a journalist but also as a citizen of the world. As a journalist you are constantly being told that the news media have enormous power to shape society and events, to change lives and history. So why are we so careless as a society about the future of journalism itself ?” [1]

This is how Charlie Beckett presents his book “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), in which he tackles the main challenges to journalistic practice in our days, and its influence to maintain free and democratic societies .

Charlie Beckett is a journalist with a 20 yearscareer at the BBC and ITN, and he is also the founding Director of POLIS, a think tank about journalism and society at the London School of Economics. “SuperMedia” is a work that gathers and structures several streams of thought about the future of Journalism as a essential service to contemporary societies, and how the changes in the news industry, beyond inevitable, are necessary.

Alex Gamela posed a few questions to Charlie Beckett about his book (Portuguese version available here).

“I estimate that we have five years – perhaps ten – to save journalism so that journalism can save the world. “

So, why is journalism in danger? For Beckett, this is due to a “mixture of economic pressures, political repression ( [in] places like Africa, Russia etc) and the shift of people’s attention to new media alternatives”.

The traditional media have kept their relationship with the audience fairly unchanged in the past few decades, which seemed to work just fine, but with the coming of new technologies that relationship shifted, and the news industry seems to be having some difficulties adapting to the new circumstances.

I had to ask Charlie Beckett a question he himself raised in his book: “What is wrong with the media business?” “It is too formulaic, too closed, too limited.” In fact, the trouble and the fears are increasing in the “dead tree” industry: dropping profits, lower circulation, staff cuts, and the reluctance of many professionals to embrace the new ways of communication.

Despite all that, journalism’s job is still the same: to inform. And the flow of information in a free environment allows a better knowledge of what surrounds us, and a more effective interaction with it. But, for a long time, journalism took the part of the messenger that was never accounted for.

And what is its role nowadays?

“Journalism has many roles: entertainment, watchdog, informer, forum, economic medium and more. Societies with open and thriving news media seem to be richer and more well-adjusted.”.

At the heart of the news process are journalists, an ill-viewed class at the eyes of most citizens. Under such a pessimistic perspective on the function they perform, I asked if journalists had forgot about their responsibilities:

“Of course not”, says Beckett, “but a journalist’s priority is to do their job well. Wider responsibilities should be considered by the journalist and their organisations, but everyone will shape them differently. Networked journalism allows the public to help define and then share the responsibilities.”

Networked Journalism

Charlie Beckett spends a large part of his book talking about networked journalism. As he explained on BBC “Networked journalists share the news process with the audience right from the start: from information gathering to distribution, in active, participative way.”[2]

In a nutshell, Beckett described it to me as a “thorough-going change in journalism practice which challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream journalism. It synthesises the functions of editing, reporting and packaging with much public involvement throughout the process.”

As long as they have access to a computer or a cell phone, any member of the audience can collaborate with journalists as a citizen journalist, through wikis, blogs, or providing multimédia contents. Or they can just sit back and watch the results of this collaboration.

This implies new perspectives and an extension of the news agenda that expands with each participation. This synergy can rebuild public trust in journalism, and an increase of media companies’ knowledge about their audiences: “People are increasingly sceptical but that can be a good thing. Old Media didn’t take audience seriously because they never met them.”

But the participation of amateurs in the news process raises the content quality issue. For Charlie Beckett this does not apply: “There are vast amounts of rubbish on corporate media.”

Another one of the most discussed subjects on New Media is how they can generate revenue: “Much too big a question! If I knew the answer I would be very rich.”

We’ve been watching practical examples of this evolution: the celerity of how the Sichuan earthquake was reported on the web, the democratization of multimedia content, the development of social networks and virtual communities, etc. But more than a technological evolution, networked journalism is a philosophy: “(…)is a return to some of the oldest virtues of journalism: connecting with the world beyond the newsroom; listening to people; giving people a voice in the media; responding to what the public tells you in a dialogue. But it has the potential to go further than that in transforming the power relationship between media and the public and reformulating the means of journalistic production.”.[3]

The multiplication of ways to communicate means that there is a whole lot more information than ever before, where each individual can express himself according to his own agenda. I told Charlie Beckett that the media landscape looked like a broken mirror, with different platforms in different media, for fragmented audiences, using various applications. He replied: “What’s wrong with diversity and difference and distance? But generally more public participation allows greater voice and more connectivity.” Between people, and between audience and media companies. Are the new networked media outlets becoming the heart of communities? “Yes – but they might also be on the edges of communities or outside of them. NJ naturally works best when supported by groups of people but those communities might not be geographical.” The geography that we relate to now is the one of concepts, tastes, ideas.

In his book, Beckett extensively reports on how the networked media can influence the political conscience of citizens when mainstream media is alerted to subjects that usually would remain hidden under the stack of the news pile that fills newsrooms everyday. Networked journalism allows a reformulation of the news agenda, making way to news that are important to smaller communities, or society in general, but of which is disconnected for not being provided with information about that reality. The main example that Beckett uses is Africa: how can societies with few economical resources, educational and democratic deficits, and a low technology penetration rate can benefit from something like networked journalism? Africa does not have widespread internet network, but in most countries there are structures that enable a good cell coverage.

The participation of independent voices in the construction of a news image of Africa, created far from governmental pressures, may give us for sure more insightful perspectives than the ones provided by state media, or by correspondents that can’t reach everywhere. With the easiness of spreading information via mobile devices, Africa may become the perfect testing ground for networked journalism.

“It’s not the perfect testing ground. I said that it is the ultimate test, because so much old media has failed in Africa. Networked journalism offers a fresh opportunity that can be grounded in African’s own experience and expertise.”

But is this a path without risks? The power of networked journalism is to influence common people’s lives, but are there any dangers in this way of doing things?

“Who are the ‘common’ people? I honestly don’t see any real ‘dangers’ in new media trends that aren’t common to old media dangers. People will still be dishonest, biased and greedy online as well as offline, but I honestly don’t think that new media has any new threats compared to old mass media.”

Hyperjournalists

There are clear advantages in embracing new media: they’re cheap, fast, more effective, and their potential is almost infinite. Still, there is a lot of suspicion over them:

“People always resist change. New media means learning new tricks. Some jobs will go. And it challenges the assumptions of old journalism so some people will find that threatening.”

And what standard procedures journalists must follow in this brave new world? “There should be NO standard procedures. That is old thinking.” In “SuperMedia”, Beckett defends that versatility and the ability to adapt are the most important features for future communication professionals, not only to new Technologies and market characteristics, but also to their relationship with the users. The journalists of the future must know how to use social networks in their favour, create and package news in several formats, and know how to manage user contribution before, during and after publishing.

To Beckett, “Journalism likes to think it is a superhero when it is really Clark Kent.”[4]. A journalist’s superpowers are his ability to colaborate with the audience, but that doesn’t mean that his activity will become more precarious: “The journalist is just as needed because you need filters, editors, and packagers but they will have to become facilitators, connectors and enablers as well. It’s a more complex and interesting job and just as vital.”

Will the heightening of the complexity of journalistic activity make journalism more reliable, even better? Beckett believes that “it will be as reliable as the people who make it. ‘better’ is a very subjective word. But yes I think that public participation raises standards by increasing resources.”

Hyperjournalists training for Super Media reality should be “much more multi-skilled and work more on problem-solving to foster a craft of creative engagement with the public rather than spending months learning to copy journalists of the past.”

The problem is that the relationship of journalists with elements outside to newsrooms hasn’t been easy. Beckett wrote extensively about the journalists’ relationship with another emerging class, bloggers, that seem to be living above the rules imposed on journalists, and that rapidly won their way as information distributors. Have bloggers as many responsibilities as journalists nowadays, and should they have their own ethical code? Or will quality become the true regulator of their activity?

Beckett believes that bloggers don’t need an ethical code: “Most journalists ignore any codes they might have. The guarantee of quality or reliability is diversity, accountability and that comes with networked journalism.”

After all, we all can become journalists. As Beckett says, journalists are “people who report, analyse and comment on events and issues for other people to consume.” And it’s in the crossing of these relationships that Supermedia is created.

The SuperMedia Challenge

“Supermedia” is a networked book itself. Charlie Beckett resorted to the ideas by Paul Bradshaw, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and other new media thinkers – besides referring to other personalities that affected that reality to ground and develop his own concepts.

What comes out of it is a rather optimistic perspective (at least that is how it seems to me, despite the gloomy principle it stands on) that provides practical indications on how media, from corporate to personal, could and should develop. It’s a fundamental work in this period of transition and definition of what it is journalism, what is it good for and who is it good for.

Enriched with the author’s perspective about the social importance of media, it’s the perfect digest of several streams of thought on the ways industry and audiences should follow in the future. It’s not a complex book regarding concepts, but it is in the implications inferred, and i believe it will turn into an excellent guide for professionals and journalism students, to understand how we pass from a one way, corporate and limited communication, to another, networked, relational, costumized, communitary. And the questions raised in the book don’t have necessarily only one answer.

Above all, Beckett defends the increasingly mooted idea that the news is a service, not a product, therefore the public interest stands above all the rest. It’s a strange way to liberalize something that belongs to everyone, and that must serve the common welfare.

Like he says in his book, “journalism can be a greater force for good.” I asked him if that “mission, should we accept it”, is possible: “Of course anything is possible. But it is a choice. We get the media we create.”

You can buy “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” here, or download the first three chapters from Polis website.

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