Beacon Reader

» see beaconreader.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Beacon Reader launched in 2013 out of Oakland, built by the journalist Dan Fletcher with Adrian Sanders and Dmitri Cherniak, and went through Y Combinator the following winter. The proposition was one sentence long. You pay five dollars a month to a writer you want to exist, and that five dollars also unlocks everything every other writer on the site publishes.

I was not a Beacon backer and would not have been. In 2013 I was an engineer in Ankara reading English-language reporting for free the way everyone else did, and the American argument about who should pay for journalism was one I watched rather than joined. It stayed interesting anyway, because Beacon was testing something that mattered outside America: whether a reporter can carry a subscription on their own name, without a masthead behind them.

For a while the answer was yes, in bursts. The Huffington Post raised over $40,000 on Beacon to keep reporters in Ferguson. Shane Bauer raised about $75,000 for the investigation where he took a job as a guard in a private Louisiana prison, which became one of the decade's most-read pieces of American magazine journalism. Techdirt pulled roughly $70,000 for net neutrality coverage, and the Texas Tribune ran a shale-boom series through the platform.

~ the record ~

~ how the money worked ~

About sixty percent of your five dollars went to the writer you picked. The remainder was split across the network of writers, with a slice held back in a bonus pool paid out according to how many readers hit recommend after finishing an article. Beacon took a minority cut of what each writer generated, priced against the thirty percent that app stores were charging at the time.

Twenty thousand people put money in over the platform's life, and in 2015 alone Beacon moved more than $1.5 million to journalists. Those are respectable numbers for a company nobody outside the media business had heard of. They are not numbers that support a venture-backed startup in San Francisco with engineers on payroll.

~ the fall ~

The failures were noisier than the successes if you were paying attention to the individual writers. A staff reporter with an institution behind them could clear a target in a week; a freelancer with a good idea and four hundred Twitter followers usually could not clear it at all. Crowdfunding rewarded the people who already had audiences, which is the opposite of the problem Beacon set out to fix.

By September 2015 Fletcher was saying openly that they had almost completely done away with the notion of subscriptions and the paywall, and had moved to partnerships and matching donations from foundations and news organizations. That is a different company than the one that launched. A year later the replacement had not caught either, and on 12 September 2016 every active subscription was quietly canceled.

~ after beacon ~

The email went out on 4 October 2016 saying Beacon was no longer offering services to journalists or backers. It offered no explanation, which annoyed the people who had written about the company for three years as the best hope in its category. Contributoria, the Guardian-backed version, had already closed that year, and Byline was struggling, so the whole crowdfunded-journalism cohort emptied out within about eighteen months.

One footnote outran the company. Dmitri Cherniak, the co-founder who wrote much of the code, went on to generative art and made Ringers, the Art Blocks series whose single most famous output later sold for millions of dollars. The engineer who could not get strangers to pay five dollars a month for reporting found a market that would pay considerably more for an algorithm that draws string around pegs.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »