Abstract
The media landscape has drastically changed during the past decade with the emergence of new models and platforms allowing citizens to become amateur journalists and news publishers. Alongside traditional players, newcomers and do-it-yourself initiatives emerged in the market with the help of platforms that seek to connect with a potential audience and offer alternative funding means, such as crowdfunding. Success cases and innovative examples abound in the literature, often on a case-based analysis, showing the potential of this funding model to support local projects and investigative journalism. It is the aim of this paper to descriptively unveil the characteristics of such crowdfunding calls via a content analysis using the Kickstarter website, as this is generally a representative case of the reward-based crowdfunding model worldwide. This study contributes to discuss not only the features of calls but, furthermore, to which extent crowdfunding seems to bring about novel ways of creating and sharing content.
Highlights
Journalism media and printed publishing have suffered considerable transitions in the past decades with the advent of digitization and new technologies (Pavlik, 2013)
One of the most recent and still underdeveloped innovations in funding systems for all sorts of cultural content comes from crowdfunding initiatives, in which a large number of supporters back the pre-production of content either via subscription or subject to a one-time payment that allows them exclusive access to content
This paper aimed at describing the features of crowdfunding calls for Journalism comprehensively including almost all the databases on Kickstarter for this category
Summary
Journalism media and printed publishing have suffered considerable transitions in the past decades with the advent of digitization and new technologies (Pavlik, 2013). Innovation in format and content opened up a myriad of ways through which information can be spread out. Such innovations usually entail transformations in the funding systems, even though traditional media groups typically remain in the market coexisting with numerous small players of the so-called “niche” markets (Cool & Sirkkunen, 2013). Crowdfunding is an emerging and still growing system for financing projects of various motivations (Mollick & Kuppuswamy, 2014). It has primarily evolved from the cultural sectors to other areas such as design, technology and, remarkably, journalism and publishing. It is our aim to focus on the features of crowd-funding journalism: its main characteristics, results and innovative aspects
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