By NYU Staff

It’s hard to miss the pitch. Right on its home page is a large “donate” button and on its “about” section is a standard plea about helping the outfit reach its goal. But this isn’t a nonprofit trying to build a church or protect the environment. This is a news organization with a humble goal: tell readers about important “news you might have missed.”

Welcome to Newsdesk.org, which, while it’s been around since 2000, may well offer a glimpse into the future of journalism, or at least a slice of the future funding model. A small but growing number of journalistic sites are abandoning the idea of the advertising-only model to pay for the cost of running a news operation and turning to readers for help. It’s a model slightly different from sites that rely on a single foundation or backer — which has become another popular option in journalism. But founder Josh Wilson insists that this populist approach can work for smaller, freelance outlets. “If you have a large enough audience and effective outreach, you can easily connect with people who care about a particular story you’re trying to fund,” he says.

Based out of San Francisco, Newsdesk.org has written more than a hundred original stories with an emphasis on serious investigative news from around the globe. Their “News You Might Have Missed” segment might focus on the use of battle video games to treat traumatic stress in war veterans and another piece on an Australian town that has banned bottled water.

Stories like these, though, don’t come cheap. Though the operation is run by a small team — Wilson, a part-time editor, a paid freelancer and three interns — it still needs funding. Wilson has raised about $50,000 from reader donations and foundations. Foundation gifts, like a $25,000 grant from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, have increased this year, he says, while individual donations are down.
Wilson says that isn’t a large amount of money because “there’s almost no support for non-profit journalism as ‘entrepreneurial.’” He adds, “we have to fight for every dollar and multiply the impacts of every dollar many times over.”

A fellow San Franciscan, David Cohn, is also trying out a version of this at Spot.Us. The site is an experiment in community-funded journalism, asking readers for ideas for projects and then money to report them. Newsdesk.org and Spot.Us have teamed up on at least one project, the “Bay Area Toxic Tour” series.

Still, the populist pay model does raise concerns among some media followers. Susan Jacobson, who teaches journalism at Temple University, agrees that media outlets will increasingly begin to seek micropayments or put unique pieces behind a pay wall. “I don’t think that news organizations should rely solely on readers or subscriptions to fund their work.” She says “[That] is like relying solely on advertising — almost certainly a recipe for failure.”

Wilson says he agrees outlets like his shouldn’t “put your eggs in one basket,” but says he avoids letting donors influence coverage by sticking to a “mission and organizational discipline.” He also has plans to keep adding to the pool of donors, bring in earned income and spread syndication of the “News You Might Have Missed” section to local media outlets around the country. It is possible that some readers could be turned off by requests for donations, but he hopes to “appeal to their sense of hope and inspiration for journalism as a civic need.”

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