Jeffrey McManus

We belong to a couple of mailing lists in San Francisco for parents and families, one for school and another for the neighborhood. Parents in our neighborhood are going berserk at the moment because San Francisco is apparently threatening to eliminate most of the after-school programs run through the city Parks & Recreation department, which means that working parents are going to have to quit their jobs to look after their kids.

If your only source of information on this is The Chronicle, you might come away with the sense that this is no big deal, but there’s a giant dissonance between what the newspaper is reporting and what parents on the mailing list are actually saying. I guess the budget doesn’t get finalized until June 1, but a public hearing on the budget cuts is happening tomorrow, and naturally it’s taking place in the afternoon when working parents are, you know, at work, and that’s the source of a lot of parents’ angst here.

It’s insane that people should have to band together on an ad-hoc, last-minute basis to do something about this. This is where news reporters should come in. People should be able to attend public meetings if they want, but reporters (or “citizen journalists,” whatever) should be there at every one, acting as advocates for the people who are their constituents and kicking the asses of public officials at every turn. And these reporters should be able to make a living even if big news-gathering organizations can’t figure out how to make money. (Bonus points if the person doing the ass-kicking is a smart, motivated 25-year-old with a chip on her shoulder and absolutely nothing to lose.)

There are sites that are trying to match up motivated donors with freelance and semi-professional writers. The idea is to get people to kick in a few bucks apiece to send someone with a sport coat and a notepad to bust the asses of government officials in public meetings, then write up the results and post them somewhere.

I like what Spot.us is trying to do, but for me, it falls short in a couple of areas — most notably the fact that “newsgathering” is different than “a story”. The site’s flow pivots around the notion of a single news story (and the site itself walks and talks like a news portal with a series of stories on its front page), but its model doesn’t seem to support an ongoing newsgathering process. The difference may seem subtle, but suffice it to say that ongoing newsgathering is why major newspapers hire full-time staffers instead of exclusively relying upon teams of freelancers. For example, back in the day when I was reporting the news full-time and I saw a coroner fishing a body out of the surf as I drove by, I pulled over and got the story because I knew that I wasn’t going to have to get into a protracted negotiation with an editor about whether I’d get $20 or $25 for my work that day.

And rather than emphasizing “the story,” it should also be possible to fund the writer or the beat. Ongoing funding for a column or a beat can also align enthusiastic supporters with specific resources within a news organization; news organizations can divide up that support in various ways (just like research universities do with corporate donations). You might not feel super-motivated to cough up $100 a year to support the Miami Herald, but you might spend a little something to support Carl Hiassen, and if a fraction of the aggregated donations to Carl Hiassen also supported a full-time investigative reporter, then that would give people the news they need and gives Carl more fodder to write about at the same time. It’s what we in the winning business refer to as a win-win.

So what’s needed here isn’t an iTunes for news reporting. iTunes isn’t the right model for iTunes, much less for journalism. What we need is an Elance for news reporting. Provide a way for people to suggest coverage (not one-off stories, but ongoing coverage of issues, like city government, cops, poverty, etc.) and to get donors to pay for them. Then allow the news to fly free with the understanding that more exposure will draw in more donors.

Conversely, if the donors don’t come through, we pull the plug on our coverage, and we make sure that everybody knows that that took place. When the money runs out, the system sends an email out to people saying “we will have no city council coverage this week because there’s no money.” And watch how fast the money comes in.

Why haven’t news organizations done this in the past? I suspect because they don’t think that a donation model would support their capital investment (it’d be hard to get people to donate to pay for a new building for the SF Chronicle) and partly because of the pride/prestige factor (newspaper managers have an impulse to seem like dignified corporate executives than awkward pitchmen hosting a public broadcasting pledge drive). But nobody says that this has to be the only way that journalism gets funded. It’s just one possible replacement for an advertising-driven model that has been thoroughly kerploded.

News-gathering organizations actually have been doing a kind of sponsored targeted coverage for years. It’s called pool coverage. In situations where it’s not practical (battlefields) or economical (political campaigns) to have every news organization send reporters and photographers to every event, news organizations assign one of their writers (and photographers, and I suppose videographers, etc.) to cover the event as part of a pool. The report is made available to the pool and anyone who participates in the pool can use it. The difference between the pool coverage model and the Spot.us model is that it decouples the business from the agenda — the people paying for the news determine what gets covered. Time will tell if this is 100% good (it seems like if the model catches on it might favor car chases over public corruption — who knows if Woodward and Bernstein would have gotten funding to cover Watergate wherever it led in 1972 when even their own editors thought they were crackpots, but who knows, if this model had existed in 1972 it’s conceivable that Woodward and Bernstein would have been millionaires by 1974, when being a millionaire actually meant something).

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1. This Is What The End of TV News Looks Like
2. The Business of Internet News
3. News Reporters: Stop Trying To Predict The Future