US community journalism project goes national

Community news network Spot.Us has opened up its local news platform to the entire nation in an attempt to enable pitches from smaller areas to be heard.

The platform, a project of the Center for Media Change, was set up almost two years ago by David Cohn as an open source nonprofit organisation designed to pioneer "community powered reporting" through crowdfunding.

The site is also funded by the Knight foundation which awarded the project $340,000 grant in 2008.

Once the project got underway, Cohn began to receive pitches from places outside the collection of states the site was working in, places too small to establish new sub-domains for.

"Once a week I started getting pitches in places, small places, like Portland, Champagn-Urbana, North Carolina, etc," he told Journalism.co.uk. "I wasn't going to make sub-domains for each of them - but I also didn't want to reject them because they weren't in a major metropolitan area."

"We used to say we were based in SF, LA, Seattle, Minnesota and expanding; we are now open to anyone with a good local/regional pitch anywhere in the United States," says Cohn in a statement.

"While in my mind's eye it still makes sense for Spot.Us to expand region-by-region, I don't see this happening anytime soon. This is not the end of the world. In some respects I find it freeing. In the end Spot.Us is a platform, not a news organisation. Opening up the platform is a positive endeavor, especially considering the vast majority of pitches so far have been successful."

In order to reach out to all these communities, Cohn removed the previous sub-domains to the site, which he says can be easily re-created if key geographic areas of reporting re-emerge.

"In the end it makes it a lot easier for us to start working with other people across the country that have wanted to use Spot.Us for a bit," he told Journalism.co.uk.

"It means we will continue to do our thing but not restrict it based on location. We may even support international reporting some day, but for the immediate future I am not sure what the legal implications are.

"It was always the intent to expand. But I wasn't 100 per cent sure how we would do it. Starting a nonprofit news organisation is a bit like jumping out of the plane and making the parachute on the way down," he added.

The site has also recently received sponsorship from American writer Clay Shirky. The donation will be used to reward community members for answering sponsorship surveys with Spot.Us dollars to assign to stories they would like to see funded.

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