Crowdsourced journalism

At the Tides Momentum conference, I spotted a social entrepreneur among the activists.  David Cohn is betting on his crowd-funded initiative Spot.us to be the future model for professional journalism.  He calls it 'community funded reporting'.  If you want an article written, you can submit a story idea and see if the crowd funds the story.  Spot.us has a team of freelance reporters on stand-by ready to work on stories that receive sufficient funding to cover the corresponding costs of investigative reporting.  It's like Donorschoose but instead of funding school teachers, you are funding articles.  It's a fascinating model and experiment that makes a lot of sense although will inevitably have many nay-sayers who don't believe the general public or those with more disposable income should be able to influence reporting - a legitimate charge but not much different from the corporate marketing budgets influencing newspapers and magazines today.

Spot.us has great potential, but I think the class of professional journalism overall is dying a slow death.  Don't fret; we will still get the news.  What's dying is not journalism but professional journalism, supported by traditional newspaper business models; you, me and advertisers aren't willing to pay anymore like they used to.  Some people will continue to pay for some professional journalism but a new form of amateur journalism is slowly taking over.  I compare this to what happened hundreds of years ago with the end of a different professional class called 'the scribe'.  We don't mourn their demise now because we know that with better education and new technology -- the advent of the pencil, pen and later the computer -- we can all be amateur scribes!  (aside: Now with computers my handwriting is such crap that I might need a scribe again!)   The same is happening in the field of journalism.  Just like some scribes still exist even today, some professional journalists will continue to be demanded, but more and more news will be produced by you and me and more complex filtering mechanisms built on top of websites like Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot/Wordpress and Google will do the work of sorting through the mess to deliver to your smartphone, computer or e-pad the news you want, packaged as you want it.

What do you think is the future of journalism?

by Lloyd Nimetz