“You cannot run a community if you’re not informed. Journalism is really the act of informing communities so that they can make better decisions, that is part of the public service, informing communities so that together we can know where else we need to help.”
“Journalism will survive the death of its institutions, and that means journalists will survive, but we’re going to be a little bit more of a diaspora, rather than working within these larger organizations that sort of protected us and shielded us from the realities of the world and being an independent producer of content.”
“As I was saying before, as a freelancer, this one-to-one pitching wasn’t working, I wanted to pitch the world. That was my itch, and I needed to scratch it. The second one is, bite small and chew well. I originally wanted to launch Spot.us in every city in the country and go national, and I would have suffered from death of a thousand paper cuts, is how someone described it. That sounds like a horrible way to die. It’s OK to start small and to go through a period of relative obscurity. Those are the two main things. That, and if you have passion for it, that will keep you going.”
Interview from July 9, 2009 with David Cohn, the Founder of Spot.us. Spot.Us is a nonprofit project pioneering a community funded reporting. Through Spot.Us, the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important, and perhaps overlooked stories. David is a journalist turned entrepreneur who has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Time
