Full disclosure, I am an unpaid advisor to Spot.us.

You can read my full responses to Glaser’s email inquiries here.

• People submit tips
• Journalists pitch stories
• People fund pitches or journalists to do the stories
• Stories are reported

Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody (Chapter 11), lays out three rules for successful social action sites like this to work. All three rules must fuse together to have a chance for success :

1. Is there a plausible promise? — Why would anyone want to join? In Spot.us the plausible promise is that you can help fund important journalism that might not otherwise get done. So for me Spot.us passes point one.
2. Are the tools effective? — Will the tools at the site make effective collaboration possible or at least manageable? Will the tools help people approach the promise together? At Spot.us you find a story you like and you push a button and contribute, just as you would at Kiva. It’s very easy to understand and simple to use. So for me Spot.us passes rule number two.
3. Is there an acceptable bargain with the users? — What is expected of the user and are the returns to the user enough to make the user want to participate? Will people help underwrite journalism before they see it? Will the stories have enough value to users that people will want to try it out and then keep coming back? That’s the key question for the success of Cohn’s experiment.

Lots of the story ideas that get posted will not get funded, but that is okay. The key is to have enough out there that people have some choices. The best ideas get funded, the others wilt away — at least that’s the plausible promise.  It’s like Meetup. Many group ideas are posted, a few stick and people find worth in them. Will Spot.us be as successful as Meetup.com? Stay tuned, but one thing is certain this Knight News Challenge winner is  an important experiment worth watching.

Update: As pointed out by Brendan in the comments, in full disclosure, I am an unpaid, volunteer advisor to Spot.us. But what I write here is not seen first by the folks at Spot.us. It is exactly what I would have written directly to them but went publically with it here, although I had advance notice that the site was going live. Thanks Brendan for the pointing out my oversight.

I woke up Sunday morning, checked twitter and was instantly referred to a New York Times article “A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want.”

It seems Spot.Us became the focus of an article that, from my understanding, was originally supposed to be about the concept of “crowdfunding.” Perhaps Spot.Us was a fresher angle? Either way – it certainly was nice to see the New York Times take notice of my little startup.

While it’s very cool and welcomed – I don’t want to start patting myself on the back. In truth – I would have preferred this article not come out for another few (4-6) months. The fact is – Spot.Us is still in a nascent stage. We have small victories – but nothing to celebrate overtly yet.

Plus Cohn is so engrained in new media that he writes:

Spot.Us will not succeed through any amount of attention from old media (which in itself adds to this weird watching ourselves die coverage).

This is also a good time for a couple of updates on Spot.us:

1. Cohn has formed a partnership with ReelChanges.org, run by Hal Plotkin. ReelChanges is another funding model.
2. He has a wiki where he is trying to raise money for a few projects, while he builds a more fancy funding platform. So far, one project has been funded and another one for $2,500 is 94 percent funded. Alas it does not look like The New York Times did not add much success to this relatively small project, which seems stuck at that 94 percent mark.  The 94-percent-funded project would fact check poltical ads in San Francisco. I would contribute, but this seems like something the San Francisco based people have to step up and fund. I say call out the hacks who make false political ads; it is time to expose the liars.

Now let’s see, if some folks pony up the last $125 and say they read about it on the PJNet.org does that make me — and those who pony up the money — more powerful than the New York Times.

Now the RepJ.Net is about ready to launch in Northfield, Minnesota and Cohn is finding his way in San Francisco. To learn more about our possible teamwork in the future, see Cohn’s post.

I’ve been watching ProPublica. I think ProPublica is a great development in this area. But I am saddened by something that Paul Steiger told me a while back, that he was deluged with applications from people who would have been theoretically working at some of the nation’s greatest news organizations on investigative reporting that they would have been doing, but now either were out of jobs or were insecure enough in their own jobs to think that ProPublica, even with its three years of funding secured, was a better bet for them.

That, I think, reflects about what the real climate is in this country for this kind of expensive, vitally important kind of news. 

Here is more from Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief of ProPublica and former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal:

…our budget is $10 million a year. But we do have in 25 journalists the largest single team of investigative reporters in the United States.

That’s not very much money and that’s Jones’ point, who says it is time for find a more viable model. Foundations are not enough. They have limited funding, don’t have the long-term resources and will fund start-ups, but lose interest and move onto other things.

Why can’t that viable model be everyday citizen support? My Representative Journalism project is fully built on the premise that audience will pay, if you give them something of value. I mean I hardly have any hair left and I still pay well over a $100 a year to get haircuts. Nothing is free. Why should the news be free?

Each day we read of another news organization making cuts. Eventually, the pool of quality news will shrink to almost nothing. That’s when I am convinced those of us in the public who love news will step forward to start paying the price. Yes, pay attention to the foundations for start-up money, that’s how the Harnisch Family Foundation is helping Rep J, but really start thinking how we can we mobilize the public. Just look at Barack Obama’s campaign, he has proven that by turning to the vast funding power of the public, hundreds of millions can be raised. Raising a $1 million in a day is not unheard of, Moveon.org has also shown its amazing power to do the same.

So where is the campaign to raise money for real news. We have some nascent efforts, like David Cohn’s Spot.us and Hal Plotkin’s Reelchanges.org, but they are slight whispers. Let’s do a scream out — let’s show the world what life would be like without news. Let’s borrow the techniques of the politicians and advocacy groups. Let’s be the advocates for reinventing a higher quality, even more ethical journalism. We can do it, but, to borrow a phrase, we just have to believe in change.

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

 Representative Journalism Network Trial Project Team

Leonard Witt, Project Director — also the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, outside of Atlanta

Chris Peck, Editorial Director — also Editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal

Bill Densmore, Administrative Director — also Executive Director of the Media Giraffe Project, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Representative Journalism Network National Advisory Board
Updated: April 14, 2008

Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director, Center for Public Integrity
David Cohn, Editor at Off the Bus, BeatBloggers, NewAssignment.net
Oscar Corral, Reporter, Miami Herald
Ken Doctor, Digital Media Consultant, Content Bridges
David Eckoff, Media Consultant, formerly Turner Broadcasting VP
Amy Gahan, Content Strategist, Poytner & J-Lab
Mark Glaser, Host & Editor, MediaShift
Joel Kramer, Publisher, MinnPost.com, former editor/publisher Minneapolis Star Tribune
Dori J. Maynard, President and CEO, Maynard Institute
Ken Sands, Innovation Editor, Congressional Quarterly
Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab
Venise Wagner, Chair and Associate Professor, San Francisco State University Journalism Department
Lisa Williams, Founder, Placebloggers

Representative Journalism Network Financial Support

A generous grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation with the inspirational and intellectual support from its president Ruth Ann Harnisch has helped advance the Representative Journalism concept and made the Northfield, Minnesota trial project possible.

An Update 4-02-08:

Representative Journalism Network Researcher

Rachel Davis Mersey, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication  at the University of Minnesota, is overseeing the assessment and evaluation of our Locally Grown, Northfield project.

Locally Grown Trial Project

The Locally Grown blog and podcast in Northfield is overseen by its triumvirate: Griff Wigley, Ross Currier and Tracy Davis.

Then along came Twitter. Up until this week, I am thinking what a dumb idea. Who cares where I am and what I am doing? Then I read about Robert Scoble using Twitter to alert folks that he is doing an interview and encouraging them to jump in with questions.

What a brilliant idea. Suddenly Twitter is a useful tool. Indeed, in the concept’s much earlier incarnations, it was really the first Internet use. Geeks working on computer programs would send out a Twitter-like message so other programmers knew who was doing what, where and when.

Now, David Cohn points me to a guy who lives his life with the help of lots of other people advising him what to do in a real time basis. The guy, Kevin Lim writes:

I call myself a “Social Cyborg”, a human meshed with technology to network on any media / anywhere. My presence is augmented by the minds of many, with my decisions polled from the opinions of friends (real time crowdsourcing).  

 Nutty? Maybe. On the other hand, herein may be the seeds of a new way of practicing journalism or other tasks.  

 Cohn writes:

I’m not suggesting newspaper reporters go to the same extremes as Kevin Lim, which in my mind is about performance art as well as reporting, I’m highlighting it to show how extreme social reporting can be taken. Just take a look at his use of Google Calenders and Jaiku.