Spot.us

» see spot.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Spot.us launched on 10 November 2008 in San Francisco, built by David Cohn on a $340,000 Knight News Challenge grant. It was the first serious American attempt at crowdfunded journalism, and it started from a diagnosis rather than a product idea: local newsrooms were laying off the reporters who covered specific beats, and the beats were not going to cover themselves. Cohn's proposal was to split the cost of hiring one reporter across however many readers wanted that story told.

The mechanics were plain. A reader could submit a tip about something they thought needed reporting, or a freelance journalist could pitch a story with a budget attached. The pitch went up, people donated against it, and when it hit its number the reporter went and did the work. Small pieces needed a few hundred dollars. The larger ones ran to around a thousand. Everything that got published came out under a Creative Commons license and was free for any news organization to pick up, which meant a paper that had laid off its city hall reporter could print the story anyway.

It expanded to Los Angeles in 2009 and became, for a few years, the reference example in every conversation about how journalism might get paid for next. It also raised the objection that has never fully gone away: if a reader pays for a story, the reporter has a relationship with the person funding them, and independence gets harder to guarantee than it is on a newsroom salary.

~ the record ~

~ how the money worked ~

The Knight grant covered the platform, not the stories, and the stories were the thing that had to prove itself. Spot.us did prove it, at small scale, repeatedly. What it never solved was that running a crowdfunding campaign is a separate skill from reporting, and most of the freelancers who pitched had no interest in learning it. The ones who could work a network raised their money. The ones who could only write sat at forty percent funded and gave up.

~ the hiatus ~

American Public Media, through its Public Insight Network division, bought Spot.us in November 2011. Cohn left in 2012. The institutional knowledge went with him and the people who replaced him shifted the emphasis toward newsroom-led campaigns and away from the individual pitch, while raising the vetting bar so that more submissions were rejected outright.

The last pitch Spot.us ever funded was approved on 31 January 2013. By August 2013 APM had placed the site on hiatus to run an assessment, finished that evaluation in the spring of 2014, and took several more months to decide. The confirmation came in February 2015. Linda Miller, APM's director of network journalism and innovation, said plainly that the site had not been financially sustainable at the point they acquired it, and that scaling it would have meant rewriting the code base from scratch for money they were not going to spend.

~ what it proved ~

Between 2008 and 2015 the number of domains describing themselves as crowdfunding platforms went from about 900 to about 8,800. Kickstarter turned journalism into one category among dozens and Patreon made recurring support the default shape. A reporter in 2015 who wanted readers to pay for their work had a dozen places to ask, none of which required a dedicated journalism startup to exist.

That is the part worth recording. Spot.us was not outcompeted on execution so much as absorbed: its central claim, that strangers will fund reporting they want to read, is now so uncontroversial that nobody remembers it needed a grant to test.

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