Crowdfunding for Journalism

Abstract

Crowdfunding has become a commonly used method to fund journalism in the midst of the decay of the traditional revenue models in journalism (Aitamurto, 2011, 2015b; Hunter, 2015). Crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing. In crowdfunding, the task, which is crowdsourced to the online crowd, is to donate money for a certain purpose. In crowdfunding in journalism, the task is to gather funding for a journalistic project. The proliferation of crowdfunding in journalism follows an expansive growth of the use of crowdfunding in other realms, including art and technology. Individual journalists, groups of journalists, and news organizations increasingly raise funding to journalistic productions on crowdfunding platforms. Just on one crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, the amount of funding raised for journalism has totaled more than $6.3 million, and the number of funded projects has been rapidly increasing. Crowdfunding, however, is rarely the sole revenue model for a single journalist or a publication, and crowdfunding does not replace the legacy business models for journalism. Crowdfunding typically offers only a partial support to a journalist and the other revenue streams rely on traditional funding models. The revenue streams in journalism have become hybrid combinations of multiple sources, crowdfunding being one of them (Aitamurto, 2015b). Crowdfunding, however, has become increasingly important as an additional revenue source in journalism. The rise of crowdfunding in journalism reflects larger societal changes in which labor and production processes are becoming increasingly more distributed across various actors on digital platforms. Despite the attention of crowdfunding as a new funding model in journalism, donation-based journalism is not a new phenomenon. Large news organizations such as NPR in the United States have for decades raised funding through donations. Crowdfunding, however, brings several new aspects as a donation-based funding model in journalism. In crowdfunded journalism, the funders are often contributing money for one story at a time instead of for a whole organization. There is also more transparency in a crowdfunded journalistic process compared to traditional journalism. Crowdfunding also comes with stronger collaborative aspects with the audience than traditional journalism. As an open journalistic practice crowdfunding allows the crowd to participate in the making of journalism (Aitamurto, 2011, 2015a). Crowdfunding in journalism often takes place on dedicated crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These platforms accept projects of a variety of topics, not only journalism-related projects. There have also been only journalistic crowdfunding platforms, such as Spot.Us, Beacon, and Contributoria, which have gone dormant. The pitching process in crowdfunded journalism follows a similar cycle regardless of the