Jamie's Trippin': November 2009

When I was 13 I needed 10 dollars to buy a Batman action figure. My dad wanted me to do 2 weeks’ worth of chores for the money so instead I went to the mall and stood near a pay phone booth outside the Walmart. “Excuse me but I really need to call my mom and I don’t have a quarter,” I whimpered to the old ladies shuffling by. I looked sad and cute and in ten minutes made enough to even buy a Robin action figure for my brother. A valuable lesson was learned that day: it can be more profitable to ask a lot of people for a little than to ask one person for a lot.

The more the merrier

With the advent of the internet and social media, this theory holds truer today than ever. Crowdfunding, as it has been termed, is my concept of begging for nickels multiplied by millions and it is how sites like Wikipedia and the Pirate Bay are able to operate without a formal funding model. There are countless crowdfunding projects on the web in nearly every industry and they are all benefitting from the power of a democratized web. For example ActBlue is designed to fundraise for political candidates, giving voice to underserved populations. ArtistShare is a service for musicians to fund their projects outside the normal recording industry. In 2004, Maria Schneider, became the first artist to win a Grammy with an album distributed only through the Internet.

It's like a potluck where everyone adds a little and they all come away with a lot.

Now it seems that crowdfunding may well be the solution for the ailing newspaper industry. According to Mashable, a recent New York Times story was the first piece of completely crowdfunded reporting from Spot.Us, a community-funded journalism site, to be printed in what can be considered the most important news publications in the world. The concept is quite novel, actually. As newspapers become more picky about what goes into their thinning pages, they are unwilling to pay the upfront costs for their staffers to travel and research news stories that, in the end, might not make it. With this new model, journalists receive funding by the public for writing stories that the public want to know about. Newspapers and other media then get to purchase those stories, knowing that they are on topics that people want to read. The journalist wins, the newspaper wins and most importantly, the global community wins.

Mob rule doesn't always have to result in hysteria. It's more likely to produce critical thought

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in general are proof that social media is more than a fad but a viable business model based not on capitalist principles but on the odd marriage of social ideals and mob rule. In the case of newspapers and journalists, it’s a win/win/win situation for the industry. As a public relations professional, however, the question I need to ask is, where does PR fit in?