David Cohn founded Spot.us at the end of 2008.  Spot.us allows the public to commission and participate with journalists on reporting important and perhaps overlooked topics. It began in the San Francisco Bay area and has added a few other locations on the West Coast.

Citizens submit pitches for stories about their local community, topics they would like to have reported. They make a pledge indicating how much they would pay to get that done, i.e., $25 to investigate pot holes not being repaired. Journalists can then offer to report the story or submit their own pitches and try to get funding for them.

All content is published free on Spot.us. News organization may commission stories through Spot.us, paying at least 50% of the cost for first rights to publish the article.

Our interview with the 28 year-old David Cohn explains how Spot.us works and why non-profits will be a part of the future of journalism.

What gave you the idea for Spot.us?

A couple of different things came together at the right time. First, I was a freelancer doing tech reporting. Freelancing is somewhat antiquated if you really think about it.

Fifty years ago, it’s me mailing a letter to an editor with a query. Today it’s the same but you use email. Still like that: one-to-one communications that happen behind closed doors. Not transparent. I wanted to change that so you would have one-to-many or many-to-many.

Another part of it was I worked a lot in citizen journalism. A lot of what we were doing was distributing the workload. Fifty people would each do a little reporting and we’d turn it in and see what we’d come up with. I’m a big believer that that has a lot of potential.

There are certain stories that don’t lend themselves to that, where it’s better if one person does the reporting. But if you don’t distribute the workload, what you end up with is a financial load, the financial burden of paying for the reporting. So I thought, if you can’t distribute the workload, can you distribute the financial load?

I was a research assistant for Jeff Howe who coined the phrase crowd sourcing. I started looking at crowd funding, things like kiva.org and DonorsChoose. I realized that that’s what they were doing: distributing

the financial load. I wondered whether that would work for journalism.

You say on your website that the “quick hit” is not preferred. Why?

Mostly because there’s less of a return on value for a donor.

We did a story about a book story closing. A lot of people did that story. I’m sure there was a story from the standpoint of “I’m angry about it closing” but, in truth, what’s the value for them? Unless you can do a story that no one else is going to do, what’s the value for the donors?

Journalism used to be all done in house but you should do what you do best and link to the rest, partner and collaborate. We’re trying to figure out something like cloud computing—cloud journalism.

Your coverage is all on the west coast. Why?

Only because we’re testing it out. We started in San Francisco. We added Los Angeles in December of 2009 and Seattle in March. I’m looking at some other cities. And after that, I may just pitch out this idea of a network.

I originally envisioned this as like Craig’s List, mostly in big cities but I’m finding

that that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve gotten some really good pitches from places like Eugene, Oregon. I’m not going to create an entire network just for Eugene but I don’t want to be exclusive and say, “sorry, Eugene, you’re not a major metro so you don’t get to use my site.” I’m going to continue to expand to major metro areas but I may just say that we’re dedicated to local or regional reporting.

We’re a non-profit so we’re mission-driven and I think that local is where reporting is suffering the most. The president of the Knight Foundation says that young kids know more about what’s going on in Washington, D.C., or Iraq than what’s going on their own town. Democracy does still happen at a local level

Are non-profits the future of journalism?

I think they are a part of the future, not the future. I’m always against people framing things as the answer, the silver bullet. The worst-case scenario is it’s something we need now in this transition phase to get us by. They’re absolutely essential until the market figures itself out.

They’ll be part of the future for sure but they’ll have

to collaborate with for-profits and will be a part of how for-profits manage. For instance, if I were running a newspaper in Texas right now I would be figuring out how to leverage the Texas Tribune for all it’s worth. That would make my business leaner and meaner and more successful.

The New York Times is really pushing the boundaries on this. In Chicago they have the co-op they’re working with. They’re working with the NYU School of Journalism,  with CUNY. All these mini-relationships help subsidize the bottom line of the New York Times. They enhance their ability to cover all they need to cover. In many ways, they are the best one to foster those relationships because they have the brand as the paper of record.

You gave a speech in 2008 at Columbia called “The Changing Media Landscape.” Would you say the same thing or something different now?

One thing I probably said is that anyone that tells you they know what things are going to look like in five years is absolutely lying to you. No one knows.

I’m an optimist. There will always be a robust marketplace for journalism and reporting.

It will be incredibly competitive. There will always be a demand for good, accurate information. Some part of the journalism market will bounce back but it won’t bounce back to be as robust as it was because publishing companies don’t have a monopoly on it anymore.

The manner in which journalism is done will improve. Parts of the process are very opaque and old fashioned. It will become something that the public can participate in. You cannot get them to participate unless you are transparent.