Brian James Kirk

In June, 26-year-old David Cohn—relishing his recent $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation—stood before a group of 50 journalists at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference answering questions. Yet, he couldn’t keep his mind off Shel Silverstein’s poem, “Whatif.”

“It’s about a kid who’s like, ‘what if this happens in my sleep,’ or ‘what if that happens to the world,” Cohn says.

“What if, what if, what if. The entire crowd had the what-ifs.”

The audience was questioning his recent grant winner, Spot.US, a journalism platform that relies on donations to fund freelance investigative journalism. The first question from the crowd was obvious—what if money influences the editorial process?

“Well, I limit how much one person can donate to 20 percent of the total,” Cohn said.

The crowd pressed on. “What if five people are all willing to do that? Then they’ve influenced it,” one member of the audience noted.

“Well, there’s an independent editor who’s assigned to every story,” Cohn said.

The last question broke him. “What if if the editor is in on it, too,” someone asked.

The conference attendees were some of Cohn’s harshest critics, but he saw the experience as silly. “We can what-if all night,” he says now. “There’s no end to the what-ifs, but in the end, that’s not going to help journalism. There’s a point where you just need to be productive, go out, and see what happens.”

Cohn has been doing just that. Since setting up a wiki—a collaborative web technology for him and users to correspond to one another at the Spot.US web site—soon after winning a grant last year, his project has funded three investigative pieces using his business model.

The premise of the project is simple. A journalist or user pitches a story. The idea is posted to the site’s wiki. Users pledge to donate a portion of a pitch’s budget, and when the budget is fully funded, the pledged fee is charged to users’ credit cards. The journalist begins reporting.

Cohn insists that pitches should be as evergreen as possible, so stories, which have taken up to two months to fund, can still be valuable when the money is raised. For that reason, Cohn says that Spot.US is not for every journalistic venture.

“’Fire across the street! Fund me so I can report on it.’ Not going to work,” he says.

Another problem with the model, according to Cohn, is that it’s impossible to fund stories that require stealth. Investigative pieces that are researched behind-the-scenes, without tipping-off officials, won’t work. Yet. Cohn hopes that in the future, beats could be funded through his model.

Once a story is completed, Spot.US takes a unique approach to controlling its content. For the first six weeks after a story is completed, it is marketed to news organizations who may want to purchase full rights. If this happens, the money donated for the reporting is given back to users of Spot.US as a voucher to invest in future stories. If a story is not purchased, or after six-weeks is up, the story can be published for free with due credit to the organization and writer. So far, no stories have been purchased, but publications that ran the story received considerable traffic from sites like Huffington Post.

It gets more confusing when looking at a pitch currently featured on the site. As more and more baby boomers are retiring, a writer has promised to write about San Fransisco’s longevity revolution. A note from an editor of Redwood Age, a non-profit publication dedicated to social activism, would suggest that the story is being furnished for publishing through their outlet. Does this mean publications can get paid to produce stories on top of their traditional revenue?

“I don’t want this to look like a corporate subsidy,” Cohn says.

“For Redwood Age, the writer is a freelancer. You’d be right to say this is a way for Redwood Age to stretch their freelance budget; their reporter is asking for a thousand dollars but they don’t have a thousand dollars. I will never cut a check to a news organization. It will only go to individuals.”

Cohn studied philosophy at U.C. Berkley, but got his start in journalism interning at Wired. He became tech reporter there, and says that learning about technology was instrumental to his career, and ultimately, to the origins of Spot.US.

“My career is wildly different from how it would have been 30 years ago,” he says.

“Then, I would have been a reporter and I would have been trying to get the attention and praise of my editor. If my first gig hadn’t been at Wired, and I hadn’t become an expert in technology, I would never have been in a position to explain to other people who the web works.”

Cohn ended up at several forward-thinking news organizations that relied or rely on participatory journalism, where users contribute content. He was an editor at Assignment Zero, Wired’s experiment in participatory research of, uhm, participatory journalism. He was an editor at OffTheBus.net, Huffington Post’s citizen news coverage. And he was a director of crowdsourcing—outsourcing projects to large communities of people—effort, NewAssignment.net.

Cohn wound up a research assistant of Jeff Howe, who was writing a book on crowdsourcing. His contributions to a chapter on crowdfunding—a sister notion of crowdsourcing—the idea of networked individuals pulling money together for causes, was the impetus for Spot.US. The models he was checking into, sites like Kiva.org—a “microfinancing” site where small contributions add up to large loans for entrepreneurs in third world countries—gave pause to Cohn. Why couldn’t something like this be done in journalism?

Though a far cry from the participatory journalism Cohn was accustomed to working with, he says the stakes at Spot.US are similar.

“This is still journalism that the public is involved in, but their involvement is by donating money,” he says.

Cohn ran across a friend’s blog post, who detailed a project he was submitting to the Knight Foundation News Challenge competition. Million of dollars were up for grabs for innovative technologies related to journalism, and on a whim, Cohn submitted the idea he had been pondering for his citizen-funded news platform. He passed the first round of eliminations, and started developing the idea more in-depth. He wanted it to be non-profit. He wanted it to be a platform, not a news organization with traditional editors. He wanted it to serve a greater good. And as he was developing the idea and the platform’s wiki site, he found out that he had won a two-year, $340,000 grant.

Cohn gives three reasons for deciding to operate as a non-profit. He strongly believes that a non-profit model lends itself to accepting donations from citizens. Second, he says for an experiment like Spot.US, it is important not to succumb to the pressures of venture capital and bottom-lines. Lastly, he says, “I’m young and naïve.” In hindsight, the idea of taking capital has been appealing to Cohn, who has had offers from venture capitalists he’s talked to about the idea. Still, he’s attracted $30,000 in non-profit donations.

His fundraising efforts for Spot.US can be paralleled with the site’s successful story fundraising.
“The biggest strength of [crowdfunding] is that it is grass roots and organic at the most fundamental level,” he says.

“You can’t have something crowdfunded and be like, ‘I wonder if people will be into this.’ No. They are. And they proved it by giving their cold, hard cash.”

One could argue that Cohn’s perspective on the future of journalism is refreshing. Or maybe, naïve.
“As far as journalism goes, it has to be viewed as a public good,” he says.

“What you’re doing has to be viewed as something that is beneficial to society and journalism needs to make that argument again. We’re not just here to sell newspapers, we’re here because we are a social good.”

But an argument for one of his favorite quotes, is hard to come by. “Journalism will survive the death of its institutions,” he says.

“I never try to sell Spot.US as the silver bullet. But we can be a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, a big drop in the bucket.”