Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Just five months after opening up its Data Store — which sells some of the big datasets its reporters produce for stories and projects — ProPublica says it’s generated “well over” $30,000 in new revenue. That figure comes from ProPublica president Richard Tofel in an interview with Southern Methodist University journalism professor Jake Batsell. Since they opened up shop in February, Tofel says more than 500 data sets have been downloaded.
“The 500 downloads, that’s probably more important from a mission standpoint,” Tofel told me. But those who have paid for the premium sets — so far, mostly companies and consultants from the medical industry — may well become repeat customers down the road, when it’s time to update the data. “I think we would consider it a successful experiment in that sense,” he said.
Here’s ProPublica data reporter Ryann Grochowski Jones on the store — “Our databases are a finished product”:
