Can readers finance the media?
Today, October 16, the crowdfunding project of the online edition of Colta.ru (the former OpenSpace editorial board) on the crowdfunding platform Planeta.ru ends. With the help of its readers, Colta.ru collected almost 700,000 rubles, which is more than the financial goal declared by the editorship for 100,000 thousand rubles. The money will go to pay royalties for three months. But can Colta continue to exist without a regular investor? This question remains open for now, because it is unrealistic to collect an amount exceeding 20 million rubles (this is the annual cost of maintaining the project) only through collective co-financing in Russia. But today, the possibility of a crowdfunding model of the existence of individual media concerns not only Russian but also Western media companies.
With the advent of the Internet era, media owners around the world are trying to find a business model that could save the traditional form of journalism. Problems were faced by “big” journalistic forms, as well as investigations and analytics, for which it is difficult to find an investor, as they are not in the sight of a large number of readers in the stream of rapidly changing news and web events.
A few months ago, the conference “Democratization of Communication: The Future of Journalism in Modern Media” was held in the United States. It was attended by editors and journalists of major publications and media holdings. During the event, four options were developed that could save serious journalism in the next five years and, above all, investigative and analytic journalists. The first and possibly main way is crowdfunding.
Referring to the experience of the Kickstarter and Spot.us sites, experts see the future of the media in the system of pre-ordering and prepaying articles. According to this scheme, the most famous crowdfunding resource for journalists Spot.us. On it, reporters have the opportunity to propose a topic, and potential readers to evaluate its relevance and sponsor the material. After the release, the article may be bought by various publications or it will be published on the resource itself.
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Kickstarter does not have a special category for journalistic projects. Despite this, on March 24, the Matter project, an online journal about engineering and science, which was created by famous journalists, authors of such publications as Nature, The Atlantic, The Economist, New Scientist, GigaOM, The Guardian, Businessweek and The New York Times, was successfully completed. . The planned frequency of articles is one weekly. For each material, readers will pay 99 cents. The authors collected initial capital to launch the site and develop applications for it, and set a financial goal of $ 50,000. As a result, they raised $ 140,201 per month.
Unlike Kickstarter, there is a special category “Journalism” on the Swedish site FundedByMe, on which you can post projects of any genre. Their authors are asked to support their blogs, paper magazines, reportage films, radio stations, television programs and newspapers.
In 2011, the Emphas.is website was opened, still in beta mode. This resource was created specifically for photo projects. Since recently the genre of photojournalism is losing its independence, because it depends on the politics of newspapers and magazines, and is also being replaced by multimedia forms, the creators of the site have focused on it. Now Emphas.is has a lot of photo albums whose authors need support for their release. One of the most interesting projects of this kind is the book of a Hungarian photographer with photos of young supporters of V. Putin. It is called “FC Putin Book” (“Fan Club of Putin”). The site also has an online store that has photo albums that have achieved success.
With all the world's attempts to apply the experience of crowdfunding in the field of journalism, it is important not to forget about a specific problem. All of the above sites and projects raised funds for a specific result, be it an article, an album or a website launch. That is, they have a prepaid system of an understandable product. Only the experience of the online magazine Matter gets out of this series, since readers paid for launching a project that they have not yet seen. But in the future, the journal will also use the prepaid articles scheme.
We already know that the basic rule of “kickstarter” crowdfunding is an intelligible final goal. In other words, any project that collects money on this platform should have an end result in the form of a specific product. Therefore, there are not allowed service projects, that is, those that need constant financial support, and media projects often need just such financial injections.
The Russian experience of public financing for Colta.ru on the “Planet” is unique even against the background of international activity in this field. Such a project would not pass the moderation on Kickstarter, since readers already familiar with the authors of the project did not pay for specific articles, but provided fees to the authors. That is, in fact, they were customers-employers, not knowing the final result. In just 20 days, Colta.ru collected the necessary amount of 600 thousand rubles, and today, on the last day of financing, the amount of the collection reached 694,503 rubles.
Crowdfunding can open the way for journalists and editors to create texts for a narrow audience, conduct investigations that take time and money, and also circumvent censorship. Unfortunately, there are not so many examples in Russia of using such a scheme of work, but Planet hopes that such projects will appear soon and, most importantly, readers will support such an initiative by journalists.
With the advent of the Internet era, media owners around the world are trying to find a business model that could save the traditional form of journalism. Problems were faced by “big” journalistic forms, as well as investigations and analytics, for which it is difficult to find an investor, as they are not in the sight of a large number of readers in the stream of rapidly changing news and web events.
A few months ago, the conference “Democratization of Communication: The Future of Journalism in Modern Media” was held in the United States. It was attended by editors and journalists of major publications and media holdings. During the event, four options were developed that could save serious journalism in the next five years and, above all, investigative and analytic journalists. The first and possibly main way is crowdfunding.
Referring to the experience of the Kickstarter and Spot.us sites, experts see the future of the media in the system of pre-ordering and prepaying articles. According to this scheme, the most famous crowdfunding resource for journalists Spot.us. On it, reporters have the opportunity to propose a topic, and potential readers to evaluate its relevance and sponsor the material. After the release, the article may be bought by various publications or it will be published on the resource itself.
')
Kickstarter does not have a special category for journalistic projects. Despite this, on March 24, the Matter project, an online journal about engineering and science, which was created by famous journalists, authors of such publications as Nature, The Atlantic, The Economist, New Scientist, GigaOM, The Guardian, Businessweek and The New York Times, was successfully completed. . The planned frequency of articles is one weekly. For each material, readers will pay 99 cents. The authors collected initial capital to launch the site and develop applications for it, and set a financial goal of $ 50,000. As a result, they raised $ 140,201 per month.
Unlike Kickstarter, there is a special category “Journalism” on the Swedish site FundedByMe, on which you can post projects of any genre. Their authors are asked to support their blogs, paper magazines, reportage films, radio stations, television programs and newspapers.
In 2011, the Emphas.is website was opened, still in beta mode. This resource was created specifically for photo projects. Since recently the genre of photojournalism is losing its independence, because it depends on the politics of newspapers and magazines, and is also being replaced by multimedia forms, the creators of the site have focused on it. Now Emphas.is has a lot of photo albums whose authors need support for their release. One of the most interesting projects of this kind is the book of a Hungarian photographer with photos of young supporters of V. Putin. It is called “FC Putin Book” (“Fan Club of Putin”). The site also has an online store that has photo albums that have achieved success.
With all the world's attempts to apply the experience of crowdfunding in the field of journalism, it is important not to forget about a specific problem. All of the above sites and projects raised funds for a specific result, be it an article, an album or a website launch. That is, they have a prepaid system of an understandable product. Only the experience of the online magazine Matter gets out of this series, since readers paid for launching a project that they have not yet seen. But in the future, the journal will also use the prepaid articles scheme.
We already know that the basic rule of “kickstarter” crowdfunding is an intelligible final goal. In other words, any project that collects money on this platform should have an end result in the form of a specific product. Therefore, there are not allowed service projects, that is, those that need constant financial support, and media projects often need just such financial injections.
The Russian experience of public financing for Colta.ru on the “Planet” is unique even against the background of international activity in this field. Such a project would not pass the moderation on Kickstarter, since readers already familiar with the authors of the project did not pay for specific articles, but provided fees to the authors. That is, in fact, they were customers-employers, not knowing the final result. In just 20 days, Colta.ru collected the necessary amount of 600 thousand rubles, and today, on the last day of financing, the amount of the collection reached 694,503 rubles.
Crowdfunding can open the way for journalists and editors to create texts for a narrow audience, conduct investigations that take time and money, and also circumvent censorship. Unfortunately, there are not so many examples in Russia of using such a scheme of work, but Planet hopes that such projects will appear soon and, most importantly, readers will support such an initiative by journalists.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/154955/
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