Fellow Knight News Challenge 2008 winner David Cohn took the wraps off the latest iteration of Spot.Us over the last few days, launching an engine for community-funded reporting from donation to publication.
Here’s the explanatory video:
Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
I love the idea that Spot.Us could do at least three jobs:
- Provide news organizations with investigative/enterprise content they have less funding and staff to produce on their own.
- Provide freelancers (increasingly experienced and skilled freelancers recently out of a job at a newspaper, perhaps) with an outlet for reporting and quite possibly, a source of income.
- Provide readers with a request line for news in their community.
Plenty more floating around about the launch and the idea today:
- Here’s Dave’s post at IdeaLab about applying an agile development strategy to this project.
- Here’s Len Witt scoring the project on the Shirky scale.
- Here’s Erick Schonfeld giving it the TechCrunch treatment.
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