PressThinker Jay Rosen at NYU has some ideas about finding money to pay blog editors or reporters to generate story ideas and cover stories that are being missed by other media. He calls it a "way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net." (Which isn't there yet... just an idea so far, but with some hints of financial backing.)
Relevant buzzwords from his article: SmartMobs, networked journalism, public insight journalism, and Dan Gillmor's "the former 'audience.'" (Or, as Jay puts it, "the people formerly known as the audience.")
Speaking of Dan, he's adding an almost-free-but-limited-capacity August 7 Citizen's Journalism "unconference" to the Wikimania convention up at Harvard. I wish I could be there, but one conference trip to Massachusetts per summer is enough for me.
The combination of those posts, a Times piece on journalists going it alone online (if not always to do the most hard-hitting journalism) -- and an article in The IRE Journal about funding cuts for investigative reporting -- inspired me to dump a bunch of random thoughts and not-so-random links at the end of Jay's essay. (Many of the links are "insider" references... but if you click on them, you'll be an insider too!) They went something like this:
If
these don't fit the current project, maybe they'll suggest things to do
with all the left-over money (I hope everyone took that as a joke.)... There seem to be plenty of story ideas
out there, but too few places writing paychecks for reporters to do the
digging... sifting public records, interviewing scores of people and
other legwork. Possible motto: "A Sharesleuth.com for the rest of us"? Or a new gig for Bartlett & Steele, the Pulitzer-winning investigative reporters that Time decided it couldn't afford to keep on the payroll? (While spending enough on one baby picture to keep them working through retirement.) Or a locally-focused model that could be cloned in other parts of
the country to set up public-service news bureaus at state capitals and
city halls? (New York may needs this less than anywhere else in the
country. Seed money to pay the expenses of editors or reporters at pre-existing Drupal-based community sites? (Throw in IRE memberships too.) Part of this inspiration for this long note: Just before getting to your blog, I finally read this ArizonaSU survey of journalists
saying that, when it comes to investigative reporting, their publications aren't putting their money where their
civic-spirited mouths are. Hmm. Would Knight or someone pay the tuition for Better Watchdog Workshops
for citizen journalists who can't afford to attend, encourage them to
write for freelance publications in their local areas, then provide a
safety-net online publication (and legal defense fund) if they can't
find publishers? Just thinking outloud... But read the original. Jay Rosen has a great blog, which I recommend highly. Not only is it always thought-provoking, he's also one of the few bloggers to consistently write longer posts than I do, which keeps my conscience clear when I tell my students to write "tight copy" for the Web! (With his "former audience" readers adding comments, that item of his should be 30 pages long by the time you see this.)
6:11:49 PM 
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