The crowdfunded journalism site Spot.us unveiled changes to the site today based on feedback from its users and writers. Users can now easily follow updates on a reporter’s pitch and donate their time or expertise to a story, instead of just their money.
The basic premise of Spot.us stays the same: Writers post a story pitch [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few [...]

San Francisco-based Spot.Us is expanding its crowdfunded journalism tools to Los Angeles, a move founder David Cohn hinted at in an interview with Zach in June. 
The expansion ushers in a refocusing for Spot.Us, as the nonprofit puts its development energy into serving as a platform rather than eyeing growth as a full-fledged news organization. Cohn [...]

Spot.Us, the non-profit experiment in journalism funded by readers, plans to expand beyond San Francisco by the end of summer, founder David Cohn tells me in the interview above. Seattle and Los Angeles are the most likely candidates for the site’s next iteration, and in the longer term, Spot.Us is looking to the east coast [...]

Readers may never pay for news online, but perhaps they’ll micro-sponsor it.
MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has found modest success asking readers to “micro-sponsor” the site’s most popular blog with donation’s of $10 and $25 a pop. Since the appeal began a week ago, 127 people have donated a total of $2,575, which [...]

Greater Boston, a news program on Boston PBS station WGBH, did a piece just before Thanksgiving on community-funded journalism models, like Spot.Us, RepJ, and others. It’s a nice summary, and there’s a bit of airtime for me and friend-of-the-Lab Persephone Miel. (Plus a rare glimpse of Lab HQ! We’re still waiting to crowdsource the blank [...]

— A study claims 1.4 times as many people are reading pirated versions of publishers’ content than are reading the real thing on the original content site. That this “study” was performed by a company that claims to track down said pirates (for a fee) should make you reach for the grain-of-salt shaker.
— Do conferences [...]

Ana Marie Cox, the crowdfunding journalist who sought cash from her readers to pay for her closing days covering the McCain campaign, has taken it to the next level: offering a for-pay Twitter feed for on-the-scene dish from McCain HQ tonight.
Only donors who gave more than $100 to her impromptu fund drive get access [...]

An update on Ana Marie Cox’s efforts to crowdfund her campaign-trail reporting: She’s raised $7,000 from her audience (likely more by now). That’s probably not including the $2,000 she got to write down the stretch for The Washington Independent. And in a blow for transparency, she’s started detailing her expenses on the trail, including a [...]

When the magazine Radar announced it was shutting down last Friday, its Washington editor Ana Marie Cox was left with a seat on John McCain’s plane but no one to pay for it.
(If Cox’s name doesn’t ring an immediate bell, you probably know her as the original Wonkette, or at least as the young [...]