An ongoing topic of discussion in UMSL’s mass communication courses, on this blog, and elsewhere, has been the struggle to find new ways to gather and distribute news that are financially sustainable. Two very different publications that have received news attention recently point to some of the challenges and opportunities of this new era, particularly as they relate to not-for-profit or grant-funded efforts. One’s a traditional newspaper, The Telegraph of Macon, Georgia. The other is an innovative website, Homicide Watch DC. Each is seeking to survive by seeking donations or grant support to integrate students into their production process.
First, there’s Homicide Watch DC. This is website based in Washington, DC. Its purpose is to document each and every murder that takes place in that city. The landing page usually features posts of breaking news. However, the site is also organized by people. There’s a page for every victim with information about them, when and where they were killed, as well as details about progress of their case. This can include who the suspects are and whether they’ve been caught or convicted. There’s also space for people to submit memorials and frequent “guest columnists” who knew the victims personally and write about their lives. The site has been largely the work of just two people – Laura and Chris Amico. Laura Amico was interviewed on On the Media last year, where she had this to say about why the site was important to her community, where many of these murders do not get much coverage in the more established press:
However, as The New York Times’ David Carr noted in a column earlier this week, the site went “on hiatus” (that is, it stopped posting new stories) in August. The Amicos can’t manage it alone anymore – they’ve got job obligations that will take them out of the city for a year – and they hadn’t been able to win grant funding to help keep the site up and running. So, they launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to a hire student interns for a year. Kickstarter is a “crowdfunding” website. More information about the phenomena is available in an Economist article published in June. Basically, though, it’s a platform where people with an idea of something they’d like to do and create post their pitch for their project, and then people can donate money to help them do it. The project doesn’t go forward (and the money isn’t collected) unless the pledge meets the project’s specific, pre-specified goal. Many of the projects are media endeavors of some sort. For example, The Economist reports that many of most well-funded projects are for video games or video-game related hardware. The person behind the project determines what the donors get in return. In some cases it’s a copy of the work the campaign was designed to support, which means the site can function almost as a means of generating prepaid orders. If there are enough to cover the costs of the project, it goes forward. In other cases, however, the donors just get a shout-out or some sort of modest gift, just like the people who pledge their support to PBS.
According to Homicide Watch’s website, they reached their funding goal Sunday night, having received a total $40,743 from just over a thousand donors. This will allow them to pay 5 student interns to help the project going for a year. They posted a call for applications on the site Monday. According to Carr’s column, they are hoping to sustain the site and its mission in the long term by finding a journalism school that will take over the site and by licensing the software behind the site to papers in other cities.
The other relevant story has to with The Telegraph, which is a daily located in Macon, Georgia. Like most papers, they’re facing declining readership and advertising revenue. However, they aren’t cutting back on the number of days they issue print editions, as many other papers are doing. Rather, according to an article by Christine Haughney in The New York Times, The Telegraph has moved to space on the campus of Mercer University. The plan is for students to supplement the paper’s paid staff. The institutions received grants to help renovate the space. In addition to the lower physical costs of being on campus, the paper gets access to energetic, enthusiastic, journalism students for whom the digital world is a native habitat. The students get the opportunity to gain practical experience that might help them get a paying job after they graduate.
Again, things that these two efforts have in common are that they’re partially funded by donations (from individuals, in the case of Homicide Watch and foundations, in the case of The Telegraph) and that both seem to be seeking to lower the cost of gathering news by using students to help do so. Will this be enough to sustain them? It’s hard to say yet. However, these initiatives are another indication of the newspaper industry’s ongoing struggle to find some sort of solid financial footing in the new media environment.
