Spot.Us

Background

With the rise of the Internet, came the demise of print journalism. Even before the economic collapse in Fall of 2008, headlines often featured layoffs in the newsroom. The deepest cuts have been to local papers, particularly the labor-intensive investigative journalism departments. For decades, community investigative journalists played an integral role in contributing to a healthy civil society by shedding light on corruption and crime or peeling back the surface on issues ranging from public education to public transportation. With no feasible business model in site for print newspapers, the void of information must be filled.

Mission

Spot.us is an open source project, to pioneer "community funded reporting." Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. It's a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate. Spot.us believes that journalism is a process, not a product, and should be saved, not for the sake of journalism, but to serve the information needs of local communities.

Full Circle Fund Role

In the Fall of 2008, the Technology Circle recognized Spot.us as an innovative leader in leveraging technology for social change. Since then, Full Circle Fund Technology Circle members have been working with Spot.Us on several different projects to build capacity of the early start up. Some of these projects include assistance in hiring a community organizer, refining the revenue model and developing a scalable costumer relationship management system.

Impact

Within the first three months of engagement with Spot.us, four stories had been funded through Spot.Us and a community organizer was been hired thanks to the support of the Full Circle Fund grant.

Read More

Additional articles about Spot.us' work:

• Press Release - "Crowd-Funded Journalism Comes to L.A. as Spot.Us Partners with USC Annenberg's School of Journalism"
• New York Times - "Crowd Funding: A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want"

NAME: Spot.Us
LOCATION: San Francisco
WEB: spot.us
GRANT TERM: 2008-2009
TEAM LEAD: Greg Wolff

"Full Circle Fund members are helping me shape this young nonprofit from the ground up. Their advice and support has been instrumental and I am confident that Spot.Us would not be where we are today without them. I can't thank the organization enough."

David Cohn

Founder, Spot.us