Pioneering community-funded reporting
Hello! My name is David Cohn and I'm the founder of Spot.Us. We're a nonprofit organization that fundraises for independent reporting projects.
I hope all your questions are answered below. If not, please feel free to contact me directly: David@spot.us and we will add your question to this page. You can also check out our "about" page.
1. How to donate
Here's a quick video that shows the entire donation process from start to finish. It's pretty quick and painless.
2. Will I get spammed?
No. By registering on Spot.Us you will get our occasional emails. They are at MOST once a week and usually less frequent. You can unsubscribe from those anytime. You'll also get email updates specifically about the reporting project that you donated to.
3. Is it tax deductible.
Yes! We are a 501c3 and you'll receive an email receipt for your donation upon completion.
Finished content is published either by a partnering organization or Spot.Us. We often work with local news organizations (see our growing list of media partners) to get content distributed in as many places as possible. Our main condition is that the content appear on the web and is freely accessible.
All credits are returned to your account and you can direct them towards any other existing pitch. You'll have several weeks to make this decision and we'll contact you before your time with these credits is up. If you don't allocate the credits in that time period we will do it for you. We do this to keep the site liquid and keep funding independent reporting projects.
Reporters on Spot.Us are self-identified freelance journalists. We do speak with every reporter about their pitch and verify their identity. As a marketplace we will continue to build tools to enable you to find out more about these reporters and judge them on the merits of their work. But it is important to note that Spot.Us does not try to define who is and is not a "journalist." What we say is that "we are choosy but not exclusive." We have worked with a two time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. We've also worked with two high school students. The students had to convince us they were up to the challenge and were transparent about their lack of experience. Any self-identified freelancer can work with us and if they are earnest, we will reciprocate. We do require transparency about a reporters experience. We encourage every citizen to view the reporters profile and pitch critically before you donate.
As a marketplace Spot.Us is continually updating its reporter agreement. We have built this guidline as a means to explain how much a reporter can reasonable ask for during an investigation. It is based on competitive rates throughout the country for freelancers.
Privacy is very important to us. We will never share your information with a third party without your EXPRESS permission. To learn more, please check our Privacy Policy.
We accept local stories from across the country. We believe that democracy happens at a local level and while national and international reporting is important, we want to support local communities making local decisions. Local stories can have national interest, that's fine. The fundamental question to ask yourself is whether or not the story you are pitching is hinged on something geographic. If it's a story that could happen anywhere, literally anywhere, then it probably isn't local and might not be right for Spot.Us.
