Spot.us is a website where people submit tips, journalists submit pitches, everyone offers their money to fund the pitches, and then the stories are published open source, unless a media organization wants exclusive rights, in which case they pay for at least 50% of the story. It’s also non-profit, and tax-deductible.
Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
Is this the future of journalism?
Only if you get virtual coffee vouchers from them.
depends on whether major media outlets like CNN decide to start spending part of their massive CGI/hologram budget on fact-checking and decent investigative journalism.
God, I hope that’s not the future or journalism. If you let the masses pick which stories the journalists write, my guess is that 90% of the content will be about one of the following topics: cute puppies, celebrities doing dumb stuff, regular people doing REALLY dumb stuff, and the occasional juicy political scandal about “wide stances.”
Considering how dumb most of us are these days, I’m kind of against letting the popular vote control what information we receive. While it’s a supplemental kind of thing, maybe it can work. But replacing journalism completely with this concept? Ugh.
Whoops — future OF journalism, I mean! See? Look how dumb we are!
Allright!
More Brittney and J-Lo!