Soft Machine³ - Arts Tech and Other

Community Funded Reporting

About David Cohn, Spot.us Director:

David Cohn - Bay Area - member since October 11, 2008

http://www.digidave.org

David has shown interest in Gov’t + Politics, Cultural Diversity, Environment

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About David

I have been working in journalism since college. You can browse my work history and samples for more.

As for me personally. I’m a bit of a geek, but I enjoy every minute of every day working on Spot.Us. I’m ready to build this website out into something very exciting.

All I want to know is… who’s coming with me?

Work History

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Freelance Writer

I have freelanced for Wired, Seed Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Times and more.

Director of Distributed Reporting

I worked with Jay Rosen on NewAssignment.Net. As such, I worked on the following projects: NewAssignment.net (the blog), Assignment Zero, Beat Blogging, OffTheBus.net and others.

Director

I received a grant from the Knight Foundation to build Spot.Us. I’m loving every minute of it.

Cohn recently wrote a “half year report:”

 

It has been a year since Spot.Us was officially announced as a project and six months since our website launched. So it is time to reflect back on what we have accomplished, where we have succeeded and failed. It is amazing what can happen in six months!

It is far easier to look at one’s own project, their baby, and gleefully point out where it has surpassed expectations. Don’t worry, I will probably do that in this post. At the same time, however, I feel an obligation, perhaps with an extra critical eye, to point out where it can improve. This post will include the good, the bad and the ugly.

Why? The concept of “community funded reporting,” “community supported journalism,” whatever you want to call it – is FAR larger than Spot.Us. We are building an open source CMS so others can join us easily (Join our Google Group for discussion) but as we proved before our launch – anyone can do this with just a wiki. With that in mind – it is important for Spot.Us to convey the lessons we’ve learned. Strategies trump technology any day of the week.

via State of the Spot – Half a Year Since Launch « Spot Us – “Community Funded Reporting”.

 

[about John Welsh]

My Spot.us profile

One of the early pitches I helped fund was the Oscar Grant story:

Oscar Grant and Oakland’s Faultline

My email spam folder contained this note from Cohn regarding the Oscar Grant reporter, who is M.I.A.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this note. Recently in a six month view of Spot.Us I noted that we were dealing with a reporter that had gone missing in action.

More Selective in the reporters: In the beginning Spot.Us let anyone create pitches and we would take them down if they proved unresponsive or raised any red flags. While we still want to be inclusive (proof of it in this pitch from two high school students) we are putting reporters through a slightly more rigorous screening process before pitches go up.

Wonder why: Yes – we got burned. One reporter who we successfully funded has gone M.I.A. ….

Unfortunately it was a story you wanted to see produced: A short documentary on Oscar Grant. The reporter was responsive in the beginning but as you might have gathered from the silence and limited updates, has done little since being funded, despite our repeated efforts to get something from him. While the reporter hasn’t “made off with the money” (we don’t pay reporters until they deliver something) I am saddened that the initial video documentary on Oscar Grant’s death won’t be produced. It continues to be an important story.

I cannot apologize enough for this. In the end - these things do happen. Every industry can become a victim of folks who just don’t follow through, but you deserve better and in the future Spot.Us is putting reporters through a more rigorous background check.

Moving forward: We have a new pitch that is related to police violence in Oakland that will touch on Oscar Grant’s shooting as well as other acts of violence in the community.

http://spot.us/pitches/202
“Civilian Oversight of Police in Oakland - Breaking the Wall of Silence.”

 

This sort of community funded journalism can help foster better habits and accountability in the community. For example, I was not aware of the “International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement” before this; when they led the “Lovelle Mixon protest,” I connected the dots and wrote this warning for the benefit of reporters and Bay area residents.

Interview with David Cohn

Update on 20090522 at 16:42 by richardwalker

Followed up after Oscar Grant reporter went M.I.A. and the notice was lost amidst spam.