Spot.us can be considered as the leader in community funded reporting. The idea behind the website is simple and it is delivering rich content to the people who are visiting the website. It provides a marketplace for news organizations, reporters and citizens to work together. The public citizens who have news and information will get the opportunity to share it with organizations and journalists. Spot.us is an open source project and anyone who is willing can contribute to it. The public can commission and participate with the journalists to do reporting on some topics. Normally they are searching for overlooked topics, but not in all the instances.
Journalists on Spot.us create the pitches. These pitches are inspired by tips or they are based on their original ideas. All donations to the pitches are tax deductible and they partnership with news organizations. The content is available to anyone for publishing and if the news company wants it to be exclusive, they will have to pay more. If they are inspired by the donors, they can go back and give them another task to complete. The content is distributed under an appropriate license and the citizens will not have to worry about anything.
Spot.us was an idea of David Cohn and he launched it as a nonprofit crowdfunded experiment in community funded journalism. From the beginning the site offers a hub for the freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and the readers can pitch in money to pay the journalists to report and write the story. It was originally focusing on the San Francisco bay area, but now it has expanded its coverage. In 2011, Spot.us was able to become a part of American Public Media and Public Insight Network.
It can be considered as a good innovation by David Cohn because when it comes to report something on a local area, the local citizens who are living in that particular area are well informed about the situation, than the outside journalists. Some top news reporting companies also have similar features like the CNN “ireport”. But it was not very successful because giving the entire story to the readers is not effective and however journalists have to interfere in the reporting scenario.
The website is easy to navigate and it has a user friendly layout.With just a few clicks, you will be able to create a pitch and it is advised to show your passion and expertise when creating pitches. The website is very popular among the people and it is receiving a massive unique visitor count daily. They also have an excellent customer support service to help you with the questions and they do their best to respond every e-mail they receive within a short period of time. You can also go through the FAQ page before starting and it will give you a good idea about the Crowdfunding Website.