Spot.us merges audiences and funders

For the next installment in our Public Media 2.0 showcase, we're taking a look at Spot.us a social media website that works to pioneer "community funded reporting." Spot.us was founded by David Cohn in November of last year and funded by the Knight Foundation. It was formed so the, "public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories." This is a perfect example of public media 2.0, in which the public is placed right in the center of the media. The project invites media makers from all walks of life, both amateur and professional, to submit a pitch online for research into a specific field. Got a story you want to investigate and need some funding to do it? Look no further.

While Spot.us is based in San Francisco and most of the stories result from a local pitch, the majority of the issues possess both national and global relevance. Also, they are working hard to build their model out. If you're interested in collaborating on that, read this.

Spot.us takes on a new approach to media making, in which news organizations no longer dictate what makes news. This is a collaborative effort between media makers and the audience to decide what story gets attention. Audience members can provide and create a pledge for a "tip," reporters (not necessarily institutionally based) can pitch stories, and news organizations can either run the content for free or underwrite a pitch so that it's more likely to get funded. So that means there's more flexiblity all around regarding who will come up with a story, pay for it to be written, and distribute that story. Spot.us creates a model that allows the receiver of the information and the funder to become the same source. So, if the content is not newsworthy to the audience, it doesn't get funded. Simple.

This simple model is quite an ingenious step into the world of public media 2.0. In our white paper Public Media 2.0:Dynamic Engaged Publics we highlight the five fundamental changes happening in the world of media: choice, conversation, curation, creation and collaboration. Spot.us integrates all five C's.

Browsing through the pitches on Spot.us you find a wide variety of media makers --some that are still in high school as well as journalists that have written for media such as the New York Observer, Mother Jones and EarthJustice. One project that I found fascinating (and donated money to) is titled: "How are Bay Area hospitals using music therapy to treat neurological diseases?" This pitch was given by Andrew Rosenbluam and rather than try to explain it myself you can watch it here:

That's what makes Spot.us so fascinating. The multimedia pitching aspect allows you to receive the information in a variety of formats. Watching and listening to someone explain something they are passionate about is much different than simply reading about it. Also some of the pitches are supported with a peer reviewer who gives their assessment of the pitch.

Spot.us is reaching out now to the public media 2.0 community with an offer to give away its code to be built into another community or possibly into a national framework. This is just another piece of evidence to prove that they mean business (in the most non-capitalistic sense.)

David Cohn, the founder, is part of the Bay Area Public Media Collaborative , a larger umbrella organization made up of like-minded individuals who see the future of public media being formed by the collaboration of an online engaged community. Stay tuned for future ideas that come from there.