Ask HN: critique my failed news site pitch

The campaign ended last week only raising $980 in total. http://jkl.io/ is the early prototype, the pitch on Indiegogo is under the 'about' link. Basically I want to head in the direction of a largely image free and largely static served site on high level policy and politics. The low cost overhead of those factors is therefore supposed to free it of advertisers and make it possible to pursue as a donation driven site (with me working on it part-time).

So my question is, is the model wrong and if so is there a better model to pursue this kind of site? Was the pitch off and besides obvious things for the second run, like making a video, what can be improved? I also suspect the prototype, as it doesn't have comments and full story ranking etc, undermined the pitch in that people thought they were funding just that rather than the more comprehensive site I want to build.