Living in a Media World

At AEJMC this year, I was part of a great panel about using Kickstarter to fund journalistic and other media projects – hence the recent number of posts on Kickstarter…

Here are two more crowdfunded projects that have just popped up on my radar:

• Non-profit news group ProPublica hires intern using Kickstarter funding
  ProPublica is one of the highest profile news non-profits on the scene doing investigative journalism. They recently hired recent Penn State grad Casey McDermott as their intern to report on the internship economy in the United States using funding from a $23,711 Kickstarter proposal.
• Questionable Content’s Jeph Jacques triples goal on instrumental metal album Kickstarter in under 24 hours
  In addition to writing and drawing the long-running web comic Questionable Content, artist Jeph Jacques is also known for his self-recorded instrumental metal music performed under the name Deathmøle. This summer he decided he would like to record a Deathmøle album in a real studio with an actual producer.  So he set up a Kickstarter with the goal of $9,500 to pay for the studio and producer services.  In less than 24 hours, he had raised more than three times that much money, and within three days was on target to go past $36,000.Now Jeph was an ideal candidate for a Kickstarter project.  His web comic makes him very visible online (He can get as many as 400,000 page views per day), and his Deathmøle recordings have been available through the Bandcamp web site for several years as well.  But his case shows that if you have an established online fan base, Kickstarter can be a very quick way to raise funds.