By NYU Staff

Freelance reporter Lindsey Hoshaw stumbled upon an article about the Pacific Garbage Patch while flipping through a magazine. “I was horrified that I didn’t even know that this was happening,” she said. But reading about the expansive rubbish patch was not enough for the 27-year-old Tucson, Arizona native. She wanted to board the Alguita, sail to the Pacific Ocean, and write her story.

With $10,000 in costs, Hoshaw pitched her story to non-profit, news site– Spot.Us, and in less than two months accumulated most of the funds needed for her voyage.

Founded by west Los Angeles native, David Cohn, Spot.Us is a Bay Area project that enables the public to have a say in stories reported by making donations to reporter pitches of their choice. “I am a big believer that right now we need a lot of practical experiments like this,” Cohn said. A move from San Francisco to New York, led him to pursue a graduate journalism degree at Columbia University, and to later found Spot.Us after receiving a $340,000, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

People submit tips, freelance reporters pitch story ideas, and the stories are reported. When the story is complete, Spot.Us works with local news organizations like the San Francisco Magazine and the East Bay Express to get articles published. The one-year-old site has been getting a lot of attention, but Cohn admits that some people have been a bit hesitant. “We are trying something that is very different and we are doing it in a practical way,” he said.

A site like Spot.Us undoubtedly has its challenges. With all of the donations received for articles going to the reporters, the organizers rely on the generosity of the public to contribute a few extra dollars when they donate to a story. “There are a lot of challenges. Every day is a challenge,” Cohn said. The site has raised about $50,000 in contributions since its launch, and is aggressively in search of other measures to ramp up donations, including the recent launch of Spot.Us in Los Angeles. “If we are able to expand to multiple cities then we will ourselves be sustainable in volume, because we will be taking in extra dollars,” he said.

But with other locations come additional expenses. Head of Poynter’s News Transformation Initiative Bill Mitchell believes that while Spot.Us is a great experiment, donations may not be enough to keep it going.  “It’s sustainable as one of many funding systems, but not by itself,” he said. Despite having to figure out additional means of funding, Cohn says that Spot.Us is sustainable. “If you walked into a restaurant and the waiter tells you what you are having for dinner, you will walk out because that’s ridiculous,” he said. “The public likes the idea of being in control of what types of media they are going to consume. It’s completely transparent.”

While collaboration is certainly an integral component to the success of a site like this, it also raises the question of whether or not only the more fascinating stories will generate dollars. “Yes there are “sexy” causes and “orphan” causes,” Cohn said. “But it’s not so much a type of story – but a type of pitch. Some reporters do a better job of explaining the value of their work than others.”

With models such as Spot.Us in addition to the tens of others that have popped up around the country, some have called the non-profit model, the future. But Cohn is quick to deny that a model like his indeed is. “I will never claim that we have found a solution,” he says. “I don’t believe that there is anything such as a silver bullet in journalism right now, but I do believe that this is an organization that is testing boundaries and carves out value. We need more like this.”