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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

> The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one

Have any newspapers experimented with crowd-funding stories? This Niemanlabs report suggests none of the big names had as of Sept 2016 - http://niemanreports.org/articles/crowdfunding-the-news/ - wonder if that's changed?

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There are also “De Correspondent” [1] in the Netherlands, which inspired “Krautreporter” [2] in Germany and “Republik” [3] in Switzerland. Both De Correspondent and Republik set new records for crowd-funding in journalism, with the latter raising on the order of 3.5M USD. These projects used crowd-funding as initial funding though, and not for individual stories. Their ongoing financing is based on paid subscriptions.

[1] https://decorrespondent.nl/ [2] https://krautreporter.de/ [3] https://www.republik.ch/

Yes, there’s a German platform that did this fairly successfully: Krautreporter [1] (the article mentions that they were in turn inspired by a Dutch magazine). I know nothing about their finances but they seem to be doing well, and have established themselves as a somewhat niche but serious competitor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krautreporter

There is https://www.wikitribune.com/ which is supported both through subscriptions and donations. It's early days for Jimbo Wales's latest venture.

The newspapers haven't but some of their journalists certainly have, through (now defunct) platforms like spot.us or even just Kickstarter. The way I see it, working as a data journalist, the problem is that you never know beforehand what will turn up and "we will spend three months investigating this thing and who knows, maybe something interesting will turn up or maybe nothing at all" is not something you can easily get people excited about.

Don't opinion pieces work like that?

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