Spot.Us Would Love Your Input

[Digidave]

Hello all. I thought I'd open the floor to any input anyone might have on a venture I'm starting up called Spot Us. The site right now (at www.spot.us) should explain the idea.

It's similar to Kiva.org or DonorsChoose - with a vertical on reporting.

The site won't be up and functional for several months. But I wanted to see if anyone had any initial feedback about the idea. My goal is to make a marketplace that serves three communities: Readers (who can also act as funders), reporters, news organizations.

Anything you think I should keep in mind?

[Brad King]

There's two ideas that come to mind for me.

The first is Day2Story, which was an idea funded out of a class Jeff Jarvis taught. I don't think it ever got off the ground. Essentially, editors would post their upcoming budget items -- and readers would vote on the stories they wanted to read.

Along with the donor idea, it might be neat to have readers vote on the types of longer, investigative pieces -- the civic stuff -- so you could see where, if you had money to spend, you might spend it.

The other idea I heard at SXSW Interactive was Outside.in, which maps blogs by zip code, so you can see what other people are writing. It would be interesting to -- along with people donating -- to see how much they would contribute for a story, which could be mapped along side it.

[Kevin Dugan]

The idea looks interesting. You might need to add some background on the site. The simple explanation is perfect. You explain exactly how it works.

But to the unitiated, it might simply read "I pay for news." And there's more to it than that..dwindling resources impacting the quality of news in local markets and the abililty to impact the coverage. It's implied with your idea. But you might want to "define the pain point" more.

Also, as a PR person, I'm willing to bet someone will suggest I could come into this and buy my client/company some coverage. So you might want to address this too.

It could be as simple as adding an FAQ page to the site.

Also, completely blue sky, what if Spot.Us became a defender of local papers everywhere? You could roll a couple of feeds together that track the ups and downs of local newspaper publishing. You're trying to impact this and by something as simple as aggregating news about the issue, you become all the more of a credible source. This is slightly related to outside.in perhaps.

This is cool Dave. Happy to help brainstorm anytime. Hope all the input above reads as it is intended...constructive! :-)

[Andrew]

Agree with Kevin. You've probably already thought of this, but I think the role of the paying customer needs to be clearly defined. For example, I could imagine that a paying customer might believe they have some influence over the content/outcome of the story.

[Brad King]

And the converse to that is that people who don't want stories written about them could game the system in the other way as well. If there is some type of donation and vote, they could easily write scripts or hire folks to vote for stories about competitors and such.

FWIW, Kevin Rose and the Slashdot folks have a fair amount of experience with that. Not sure if you know them, but I'd be happy to introduce you to them to get their thoughts on the matter.

Gaming is probably the biggest threat to open systems.

[Digidave]

Kevin
You are right re: I need an FAQ. I'm still finishing up the specs of the site - but between now and when it gets built I really need to work on that.

I 100% want to respond to the fear that a PR person could come in and buy a reporter. That's not the goal at all: There has to be a tipping point of contributors - a community of people that are all willing to donate towards a pitch.

Keep em coming. Love the feedback.

[Kevin Dugan]

Some of you may have seen this, I know Jarvis ran it and Gawker may have as well.

http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/

It helps prove out the pain as I mentioned above. It also reminds us why exactly we're spending time on this site. Hate the pain!

[Digidave]

It's also a big motivating factor for me. I hope Spot.Us could be a platform to support journalists without having to support an entire journalistic organization.

[Brad King]

So does that mean you are aiming to help freelancers instead of news organizations -- how would this tie in with an organization

How do you make sure that you don't simply get the lowest common denominator -- such as Paris Hilton stories -- instead of actual news stories?

[Digidave]

re: Paris Hilton stories.

I'm going to use a taxonomy: So a pitch MUST be placed in a category and the categories are defined by spot.us: "education" "local business" etc.

I think I will leave Paris Hilton out of any category :)

I hope that both freelancers and news organizations can use it - but I can see freelancers benefiting the most.

One thing that Moder Journalist can help me with: I need journalists in the bay area. This is going to launch in SF to start - that's where I really want to make my mark. If it works there - we can use it in other cities - but I need a proof of concept first.

So - if you know people in the bay area, please spread the word.

[Brad King]

So it's going to be defined by you?

Is there going to be a mechanism for people to communally decide upon pieces -- or is this still a journalism-as-expert site?

As for SF, I lived and worked as a journalist there for near six years. I have tons of writing friends. My writing partner does as well. If you want to get me exactly what you want -- some kind of copy, we can discuss the best way to recruit (outside of craigslist).

Email chains are risky. You never know where they end up -- but we can get you some folks. Plus, I went to the Berkeley J-School and the new media director is my mentor -- so we can blast the grad list as well.

[Digidave]

Brad
I didn't realize you went to Berkeley J-school. I went there for undergrad.

As for "or is this still a journalims-as-expert site." - Gosh, I hope not. I want it to be a marketplace where reporter and funders can find each other. I am going to stay out of their way.
But it is important that the reporter is transparent about their qualifications: So one field in creating a pitch will be something like "How are you qualified." And when creating a pitch a topic has to be chosen. The topics will be narrowly defined by me - so as to stop people from pitching stories about Paris Hilton. After all - if this is going to be a nonprofit, I need to ensure that the stories serve a civic nature. So - "Education," "local business," "healthcare" "Politics (substance, not horserace)" etc. But I hardly think that's "journalist-as-expert." The way I think of it is is - it's similar to Craigslist creating categories for people "Jobs" "apartments" etc.

We will have to talk more about bay area reporters when it comes closer to launch. That will be the epicenter. In the beginning it might be available only to the Bay Area. That's the advice I'm getting from LOTS of people: Prove the concept first in one city - don't try and go national too quick - cause you'll die from a thousand paper-cuts. And that sounds very unpleasant.

[David]

Love the idea. But there are a few things that are sort of nagging at me about this. Some of the issues have been addressed--gaming the system, the spectre of editorial control through categories, issues with quality control.

Something else that seems an issue you need to navigate around is how bundling economics support marginal news stories in traditional media. In the newspaper biz, we've known for a long time that there is usually not enough interest in local politics to pay a reporter to track some city manager for a month, to see if he is embezzling. Yes, we have those stories all the time. That's because the grocery store circulars pay his salary and the box scores and comics page ensure a critical mass of eyeballs. So, the newspaper always worked by bundling together a very diverse set of interests into general package that was financially stable.

OK, so the Internet fkced that all up. Now people are drawn away into their own little niches, and it is easier to get box scores fed to my RSS, read comics at work off the Web amd have coupons SMSed to me.

So, bundling made the old model possible, unbundling (among other things) has killed old media. So, "new" media needs to figure out how to solve the problem of unbundling.

I get that your play is in part, a response to this. I just don't quite see how you make it work. So, 10 people are really interested in that crack house on the corner, and they will pay a buck a piece to read about it. Who's gonna take a $10 reporting assignment? I'd say, anyone that would probably would do it for free.

So, I assume you are talking about some minimal scale--500 people each willing to pay a quarter?

Whatever the numbers, once you start to build up to real money, are back at general interest--Paris Hilton. And I think that undermines your desire to increase news coverage at the margins.

And while I'm here, another kind of sticky problem seems to come up. You are betting that the wisdom of crowds an be monetized and is better suited to broad editorial deciscionmaking than the professionals, at least in some cases, and most probably in those cases of marginal news stories.

I'm just not sure that is true.

Blogging has sort of split the middle between TV's rating-driven, give the people what they want and old skool newspaper journalism's give the people what they need.

Because the blogopshere is so competitive, not only do you get a fair amount of homogenization of subject matter into what I think of as news genres (just as much as scifi marks a particular set of themes and interests) the competitiveness also drives the editorial process to constantly break new ground, try new things, dig for new stories. If the blog world is only partially successful in really doing a lot more around story development and investigative reporting, I'd say it's because of the fairly low pay per story that "new" media is paying (something I ranted about on the old list). And I'm not sure that Spot.us solves that problem either.

All that said, I'm quite excited to see how you navigate all these obstacles and would love to see this as a success!

-- David