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By Elijah Wolfson
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Beginning this week, Newsweek will be working with writer and editor Mandy Van Deven and the crowdfunding platform Beacon to raise money in support of a deep investigation into one of the most important stories of today: sexual assault on college campuses across the United States.
Van Deven's project is called "Understanding the College Rape Crisis," and information can be found on the Beacon website. Funding the project doesn't just mean paying for one magazine story to be written; Van Deven will be using the funds raised to spend months embedding within college campuses; interviewing students, schools administrators, sexual assault experts and more; and publishing regular updates on her findings, as well as intermittent in-depth reports and other features.
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At Newsweek, we are excited about and seek out new models of journalism, particularly those that encourage greater transparency in all stages of the reporting and publication process. We understand that crowdfunding is not the end-all solution to the financial challenges faced by many publishers and journalists. However, we do believe that it can help provide a greater level of journalistic freedom in certain difficult-to-finance projects where editorial mission and public interest align.
The notion that the public might be willing to fund journalism isn't new. Kickstarter itself has a dedicated Journalism channel that it says has successfully funded 455 projects to date. There are other platforms dedicated specifically to writing and editing. Contributoria, for example, is an experimental project launched earlier this year by the Guardian Media Group that combined a subscription model with a crowdfunding model: Readers pay a monthly fee to become members and, after joining, are then given the opportunity to back story ideas using a point system (the number of points a member has varies depending on the fee they pay). The final products, though, are freely available to anyone. In the Netherlands, De Correspondent operates in a similar fashion, offering $76 annual memberships that include detailed reports on how their contributions are being spent. The site's publisher, Ernst-Jan Pfauth, says that it "focuses on background, analysis, investigative reporting, and the kinds of stories that tend to escape the radar of mainstream media because they do not conform to what is normally understood to be 'news.'"
These are just a few examples in a growing field. Beacon, Newsweek's partner on this particular project, is a crowdfunding platform tailored specifically to long-form projects of investigative journalism and original reporting. Beacon was founded in 2013, and is backed by Y Combinator, the Mountain View, California, startup incubator that helped launch Airbnb and Reddit, among others. Since launching, Beacon has partnered with some great journalists to produce compelling, vital work. A few examples:
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- Working with Techdirt, the platform raised nearly $70,000 for coverage of the ongoing net neutrality fight in Washington, D.C.; it has published 51 stories on the subject to date.
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