ENTRIES TAGGED "digital frontier"

Publishing News: Crowdfunding, the new way to raise money for news

Crowdfunding the news, advice for publishers on surviving the digital frontier, and innovation in library e-lending.

Fundraising for news

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Mathew Ingram reports this week on one entrepreneurial blogger and journalist who, finding local news coverage of his home town lacking, crowdfunded his own hyper-local news blog. Ingram notes that Joey Coleman does not have a journalism background, but after he started a blog reporting local news in his home town of Hamilton, Canada, readers started offering to pay for his reporting. Since then, Ingram reports, Coleman has completed two successful Indiegogo campaigns to fund his work.

In a podcast interview with Ingram, Coleman described his journey into journalism, which started in 2004 with a domain name and a blog that, once he started writing about university news and politics, became one of the most-read outlets for university news and ended up landing him a job with Maclean’s magazine. He eventually returned to his home town to spend a summer working at the local newspaper, which didn’t do much on the web, opening up possibilities for Coleman. “My goal is to build a local news service, where the business model is sustainable for hiring a number of staff … to build a business model around journalism and then expand when I have a base that’s sustainable,” he told Ingram. You can read more about Coleman’s work in Ingram’s report and you can listen to Coleman’s interview in the podcast.

Interestingly, notorious hacktivist group Anonymous has done a very similar thing. Read more…