Crowdfunding in Spanish journalism: 5×55 Terrassa
Cross-posted by Silvia Cobo from her blog.
Eduard Martín-Borregón is a freelance journalist based in Terrassa, a town 30km from Barcelona. The media landscape in this city is quite small: a local newspaper without a website, some local public radio, one local TV station and couple of websites. In contrast, the city have a lively amount of bloggers.
During the last election campaign Eduard wanted to show that was possible to make an informative project connecting politics and citizens, even without big resources: “8 years ago it would have been unthinkable that a single person could do this.”
And so he launched 5x55terrassa.org.
5×55
The idea of the project is simple: 5 questions to 55 people from Terrassa. 55 video interviews with different people about the present and future of Terrassa divided on 12 different areas.
The local elections took place on the 21th May. He published the interviews on 5x55terrassa.org daily between March 7 and May 20, using publishing platforms including Tumblr and Vimeo, and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to promote the project.
The result is a mosaic of people’s lives, a picture of those who, in many different ways, make up the city.
But Eduard wanted to go a step further. He had many hours of good quality video interviews with different people from the city. What to do? He decided to transform all this video in a documentary, to be premiered – he hoped – at one of the city’s cinemas. Would people pay to have this document on DVD?
Crowdfunding the DVD
And that’s where the online crowdfunding platform Verkami comes in.
The aim was to cover the cost of publishing the story on DVD. Eduard needed 500 euros and asked for this money on Verkami, offering different ways to sponsor the project, purchasing the DVD and getting a ticket for the cinema release in Terrassa.
He collected the money in 40 days, with 32 people participating.
Eduard is now preparing the script. He says the experience has given him more knowledge about social platforms and the boundaries and narratives that work best online. He admits that the project has also given him greater visibility as a journalist online and in the city of Terrassa.
