Spot.us in Milwaukee?

[Claire Hanan]

A great city whose media is struggling (except that the Journal just
won a Pulitzer for local reporting), Milwaukee is a city with so many
diverse neighborhoods that need covering. Of course, it's not as
connected as Seattle (but what city is?), but I think it's got
communities who care enough to invest in something like Spot.us.

Thoughts?

I'm originally from Milwaukee, but upon graduation I'll be moving to
NYC. Feel free to e-mail me to discuss or chat.

Claire

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[Shawn]

I am from Michigan, and the media is crumbling in the Detroit area as
well. Maybe, rather than just a specific city, the Midwest could be
bunched together.

Shawn

[Barbara K. Iverson]

Hello,
I'm one of the publishers of ChicagoTalks.org in Chicago. Around Chicago we have a growing network of blogs and placeblogs and news websites that cover aspects of Chicago news. We have been meeting to see how we might collaborate and to figure out what kind of common resources we need. A local spot.us would be a benefit. I think for us in Chicago, a regional network would not be as useful as a local one.

I don't quite understand the Spot.us lite. Is it for me to set up a spot.us for a story on my site or for getting more donations to spot.us?

barbara i
Barbara Iverson
ChicagoTalks.org
Columbia College Chicago

[Nathan Moore]

I think there's a place for local and a place for regional collaborations.  No reason why both couldn't be done.  I'm in Madison, and I see a space where both could be of a lot of use.

The regional collaboration idea is also being discussed in other circles -- the CPB just funded a bunch of "Local Journalism Centers" based at NPR stations in various regions to expand in-depth reporting on particular regional issues.  The center in the Upper Midwest will be based at WBEZ in Chicago in collaboration with the public radio stations in Detroit and Cleveland, focusing on remaking the industrial economy. http://www.current.org/news/news1006localcenters.shtml

I'm reminded of a similar collab that emerged a few years ago called the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.  A bunch of public radio reporters and producers from Great Lakes states uploaded their environment-related stories to a common pool.  Over time, interest in the project grew well beyond the Great Lakes, and now it's a national environmental media project. http://www.environmentreport.org/

Anyway, if there's interest in an upper Midwest collab, these projects might be good examples to look at.  Or might be good projects to approach to work with.

~Nathan

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Shawn <raget...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[David Cohn]

All

This is really good conversation and I hope we have lots more of it.

As for the Spot.Us Lite.

Here's an example of it in action: http://invw.org/

Underneath Investigate Wests donate button is a Spot.Us lite widget button. It allows people to donate to a Spot.Us pitch without leaving the host site.

This widget is going to improve with time. But it means that you won't have to send people to Spot.Us to donate to your project. This will be a quick and light way to create fundraising efforts around specific reporting projects. Spot.Us just acts as an independent third party to assure users that their money goes towards the reporting effort that they were told it would go toward.

We are going to be creating more tools like this so that sites like Investigate West, ChicagoTalks.org and more can fundraise quickly and easily.

And of course - the Spot.Us community will grow and help raise funds where we can as well ;)

More to come as we expand to more regions. For now: If you are in Minnesota or Austin Texas - contact me!

David

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[Tanja Aitamurto]

Hi All,

and congrats on Spot.Us for the rapid progress!

I'm currently visiting Finland, and there's a lot of interest in the Spot.Us model in Finnish journalism organizations.

If a Finnish media outlet would like to try to fund a story project through Spot.Us, is there a way to translate the widget text in Finnish?

best,

Tanja

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