Current (https://current.org/tag/crowdfunding/)
Producers who have left public radio to go solo as podcasters have made some outstanding work. But the work has sometimes made them emotional wrecks.
With crowd backing, a science special featuring David Pogue would be distributed to every U.S. high school.
Station Manager Paul Hunton says the crowdfunding campaign tapped into a formula that can be scaled to size.
Plus: A producer needs her mic back, and Splendid Table gets pranked.
Public Radio Exchange’s podcast network Radiotopia has raised $620,000 from 21,808 donors on Kickstarter, setting a record among publishing, radio and podcasting projects that have used the crowdfunding platform. “We were dazzled by the response,” said PRX CEO Jake Shapiro. “It shows how dedicated the listeners are to the shows. And it means we’re going to be shipping out a lot of T-shirts.” After reaching its initial goal, the campaign achieved stretch goals as well.
Plus: WGBH options Pinkalicious, and an Indiegogo project with support from Ken Burns is falling short.
The network wants stations to build up sustainable, supportive audiences for digital series.
As a growing number of public media organizations turn to Kickstarter to raise funding for new projects — with mixed success — development professionals and others in nonprofit media have begun evaluating both the potential and limitations of this new fundraising method.
The cotton T-shirt, a public radio merchandising staple, is front-and-center in a new multimedia project from NPR’s economics reporting unit Planet Money.
Two of public radio’s three biggest distributors launched major crowdfunding experiments in the past month, with wildly different results.
A crowdfunding campaign launched April 15 by Public Radio International seeks $25,000 for a “Global Stories Fund” that will support 11 international stories to be presented on PRI’s The World and other news programs.
Spot.us, the crowdfunding website allowing journalists to raise funds for their reporting projects, has been hit by a sharp decline in usage since its acquisition by American Public Media, which has been making changes intended to revamp its business model and protect the site’s journalistic integrity in the world of online pitch funding.
Homicide Watch, a crowdfunded community reporting site that tracks city murder victims, will launch its third site in Chicago by the end of the month through a partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times, reports the New York Times. The startup is the brainchild of Laura and Chris Amico, who manage the site’s flagship Washington, D.C., edition. They’ve kept the site — which they started in September 2010 and most recently relaunched in August 2011 — running with help from crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter and Spot.us. Despite financial struggles, including their inability to find a local news organization to partner with, the Amicos have reaped many journalistic accolades for their data-driven reporting, including the 2012 Knight Public Service Award from the Online News Association. A second branch of Homicide Watch operates in Trenton, N.J., in partnership with The Trentonian.
The Peabody-winning pubradio program To the Best of Our Knowledge has successfully completed a $15,000 Kickstarter campaign to produce a comic book that will accompany an upcoming six-hour series. The series, Meet Your Mind: The Science of Consciousness, will air in November and December. Guests include famed brain researcher Oliver Sacks and Nobel laureates Eric Kandel and Daniel Kahneman. The comic book is intended to help illustrate Meet Your Mind. Jim Ottaviani, a writer who specializes in graphic novels about scientists, will pen the comic, and Natalie Nourigat will illustrate it.
Roman Mars is a hard man to find on the radio.
Only ten terrestrial stations regularly broadcast his Public Radio Exchange–distributed program 99% Invisible, a weekly show that explores the world of design…
But go online, and Mars is a superstar.
… There’s a lot of hype about crowdfunding — raising production money through a website. So far, the technique hasn’t been able to support full-time journalists, much less a beat, a substantial weekly program or a newsroom. But independent journalists, public media stations, newspapers and web startups all have had successes…
Minnesota-based American Public Media announced Nov. 29 the future cohabitation of two new-media tools for use by public media newsrooms. APM’s Public Insight Network (PIN), which helps journalists find story topics and sources in their communities, has acquired Spot.Us, a platform for raising money to support freelance reporting. Launched in 2008, Spot.Us allows freelancers to post pitches on its website for stories they’d like to report and ask for donations to support their efforts. Spot.Us takes a 10 percent cut of the donations for its own expenses and charges news organizations to create surveys for their websites. Readers who answer the surveys get credits that they can apply to Spot.Us story pitches.