| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 廣播電視學系 === 105 === This study based on content analysis and in-depth interviews, explored the development of crowdfunding journalism, including how news content producers implement crowdfunding projects and how this emerging model influences or changes journalism and journalists’ work.
The results revealed that citizen journalists constitute the largest proportion of crowdfunders of crowdfunding journalism projects. Citizen journalists continually explore news production independently and require more resources and professional support to raise the quality of their work. Communication students apply what they have learned by pitching projects, just like a micro start-up. Currently, entrepreneurial journalism has become a trend. In addition to providing skill training and teaching business knowledge, schools should lead students to discuss professional ethics issues. Traditional news media do not consider crowdfunding as a financing source and are not actively involved in this field.
Over the past 5 years, crowdfunding journalism has peaked because of social movements. Crowdfunders of at least 30% of project seem willing to endure risky conditions abroad to gather news. Crowdfunding journalism is also an option for reporters who would like to follow a particular issue for a long time. All of these features increase the diversity of the overall subjects of crowdfunding news.
In-depth interviews were conducted with eight crowdfunders. The crowdfunders revealed that they would rather take on multiple roles, undertake multiple tasks or stand the various constraints and uncertainty during the news production, in order to have the freedom of the press and much more time to track the issues and interact with their interviewees. Crowdfunders’ production practices varied from diverse business models of crowdfunding platforms. Two crowdfunding journalism platforms are available in Taiwan: weReport and SOS. weReport adopts a nonprofit, one-time funding model, and prefers to provide “seed money” for new entrants. SOS adopts a profit-based subscription model in the hope of providing writers stable funding; the business strategy of SOS emphasizes individual brands and content uniqueness.
Crowdfunders or reporters usually take the initiative in news production, compared with donors. Community participation plays a supporting role, but active news collaboration from communities is not easy to achieve. Regarding the relationship between platforms and donors, although platforms endeavor to maintain information transparency, most platforms do not follow up, depending on crowdfunders' self-discipline.
This study suggests that the transformation of crowdfunding journalism will move toward long-term development. In addition to focusing on community building and accumulating news production experience, the issue of “turning the news-demanding population into a news-consuming population” must not be overlooked. However, regardless of how crowdfunding journalism develops, the process should remain open and transparent.
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