GuaraniProject
Budget cuts and an inward turning media have led many people to question the future of journalism. It has also forced journalists to take matters into their own hands, and self-fund the stories that they think matter.

I am in the process of trying to raise enough money to fund the first part of a documentary about the Guarani Aquifer in Latin America. This process has pushed my role as journalist/director to include advertising strategist, brand manager and social media guru. And it has shown me yet another way that the changing media environment is changing journalists too.

The Guarani Aquifer first cropped up in research I was doing for an article about water-related conflicts over a year ago. I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of it before. The aquifer is a huge water resource, which contains enough water to sustain the world's population for 200 years.

I managed to find about half a dozen references to the Aquifer in the mainstream media, and a handful of academic papers on the subject. And what I was able to piece together from these sparse sources added up to quite a story.  The aquifer is pitting the indigenous Guarani people against heavy industry in the region.

There are a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the Aquifer, including one that has labelled George W Bush's ranch on the aquifer in Northern Paraguay as a neo-imperialist threat to South America's sovereignty.

There is a celebrity angle to the story: the James Bond movie, The Quantum of Solace, despite being set in Bolivia, was allegedly based on the Guarani Aquifer. And climate change could make us all reliant on the Aquifer's water one day.

Lack of interest
But this wasn't enough to get the interest of editors, and to secure myself a commission. The main problem was that although the story sounded great on paper, I hadn't been able to go down to South America to see what was actually happening on the ground.

After a gap of a couple of months, when paid work had to take precedent over my own projects, I came back to the story of the Guarani Aquifer with a renewed vigour. I had watched water stories gain prominence in the mainstream media; not a huge increase but enough to make me realise that I needed to get the story of the Guarani Aquifer now.

I teamed up with two filmmakers/photographers, and decided to take a different approach to getting the project up and running. I had come across Kickstarter, a website that allows individuals to publicise their project to the world and to raise funds through small donations by individuals.

The Obama technique
I saw that there were two benefits to this approach. Not only would I be able to raise enough money Obama-style, through small contributions, but by getting people involved I would then be able to quantify the public’s interest in the story for editors and production companies.

Before The Guarani Project funding bid was launched I had spent weeks developing a brand and a following around the project. I created a website, a Posterous blog and a Facebook fan page. The Guarani Project is also on Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube and Flickr.

The Guarani Project was launched on Kickstarter on 22 February with a $14,500 target. Now just over a week into a 61 day funding bid we are seven per cent of the way there.

I am, of course, by no means the first journalist to do this. Documentary filmmakers have been backing projects with personal funds and small donations for years.

But social media is allowing journalists to connect to their audience in a new way. And with the advent of sites like Kickstarter, the reader/consumer is turning into the funder/producer. What's the next step?

Will the reader eventually become the commissioning editor too? Community funded news websites, like Spot.us, are already propelling readers into that role with their 'start a story, fund a story, read a story' approach.

The internet has made us all expect our news for free. And as editors and media owners debate how to make journalism pay, sites like Kickstarter offer an interesting alternative.

Pushing the reader into the funder's role requires them to rethink their relationship to news and information.  And most importantly, it draws the reader into the conversation, contributing to a richer, more informed narrative. Is this the new reason to pay for journalism?

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