Show B New media model offers journalism for sale James Rainey Los Angeles Times Would you be willing to kick in 20 to have someone get to the bottom of the murky finances at your kids kid's school How about contributing 30 to find out if your trash haulers really sift recyclables from the garbage like they claim If that sounds intriguing I give you David Davi Cohn Cohn is a skinny young man of abundant enthusiasm who's primed to pump new energy and cash into what sometimes feels like the worlds world's most beleaguered profession journalism He is the founder of Spot us a Web site that allows the public to propose stories and pay for journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories On the visitors leave story tips and reporters pitch formal proposals trying to persuade other folks to contribute 5 whatever to turn rum ideas into stories stones Journalists on the site ask for generally to 1000 And individuals can give a maximum or 01 of u lU percent so no one person can have an undue stake in inthe inthe inthe the story That groundbreaking model has helped to midwife and then post six stories in its first three months Supporters have up enough cash for six more stories with five other writers in pursuit of donations for their ideas The finished stories appear on the site although Cohn hopes to sell exclusive rights to future work to Web sites newspapers or other outlets In such cases the micro donors who bankrolled the stories could recoup their investments Stories have so far focused around the projects project's home base in the San Francisco Bay Area The pieces have explored bay pollution the expanding elderly population and sewage processing Others in the works will delve into San Francisco's wealth disparity and police tensions in Oakland Its It's hard not to root for Cohn 26 who had the chutzpah to try something new the tenacity to get it off the ground and the maturity to know that it might not work God and Google know that the old monopolistic print advertising model will never make a scale full-scale comeback So more power to any endeavor trying to push serious journalism into a new era Yes there is a But coming here To wit The fledgling sites site's platform outperforms its product Sp stories simply need to be better The four I checked out three written and one a radio report did not particularly engage incite or entertain A three-part three series on how Bay Area communities are planning for a booming population of the elderly let experts drone on while giving almost no voice to its actual subject old people A piece Apiece on the aftermath of an oil tanker spill delivered no surprises while a story on the gasoline additive ethanol meandered and choked on jargon Can you say scaleable oxygenate The radio report didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about concerns over how potentially lly contaminated sewage solids get plowed into farmland Cohn won a innovation grant from the journalism-centric journalism Knight Foundation so he has a couple of years to get this right Its It's still early He concedes with only mild pushing back that the site needs to raise its game speeding up the micro- micro financing which now can take months to generate reporting fees and honing story quality Speaking to a group of students and faculty last week at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication Cohn envisioned a time when might put out an appeal for money for a reporter to cover a beat say the police or schools That sounds like a promising option to me because reporters often cant can't go as deep on a one- one off freelance job as they can when they stick to a beat and develop real sources Still Cohn resists any impulse to deem him a savior I have said a million times is not a silver bullet Its It's an experiment We Ve need all kinds of experiments in journalism he repeats like a mantra The self-described self tech nerd graduated from Hamilton High School in Los Angeles and the University of California Berkeley before getting his masters master's degree in journalism at Columbia He embodies the If You Build It They Will Come Generation Web sensibility as on his view of the democratizing power of the Internet holds out the promise of engaging an audience before during with mail e-mail updates to donors and after the reporting process process Its It's a conversational approach with obvious advantages over the top-down top style of old journalism I get a little queasy though with some of the evangelical fervor of the new school particularly its confidence in the wisdom of the crowd Ide Ideally lly is isa isa isa a platform not a news organization he told me later That is really important to me because I should not be the one to define what is and isn't journalism what should and shouldn't be on Cohn told the use crowd that journalism is a process not a product That sensibility is evident in the sites site's nascent efforts Although stories are edited the initial results scream out for a stronger hand that demands better |