THE BUNKER – The holidaze are upon us, folks, which means the news slows down — unless there is a terrorist attack, dog forbid, or a TVA coal ash blowout.

We need your help — to be here when the big, bad story breaks, and our independent-from-corporate-influence type of journalism is sorely needed.

So as you sit down to make out your holidaze contributions, you might hit this link and send a dollar or two our way.

Every dollar goes for expenses to produce the ground-breaking, wide open, spot on Web journalism our regular readers all over the country have come to appreciate.

Thanks for that, by the way.
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THE BUNKER – The holidaze are upon us, folks, which means we go from the monster movies of Halloween to the Christmas fare on cable TeeVee, and as you know, the news slows down — unless there is a terrorist attack, dog forbid, or a TVA coal ash blowout.

It’s funny how sometimes the charitable spirit of the season moves from feeding the hungry free-lance Web journalists to feeding the homeless, which is a mighty fine thing to do, of course.

But we need your help too — to be here when the big, bad story breaks, and our independent from corporate influence type of journalism is sorely needed.

So as you sit down to make out your holidaze contributions, you might hit this link and send a dollar or two our way.

Every dollar goes for expenses to produce the ground-breaking, wide open, spot on Web journalism our regular readers all over the country have come to appreciate.

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As we move forward in the Internet Age, Spot.Us, along with the help of its generous sponsors, has been trying to understand the changing world of journalism.

After the last survey, we learned what the community thought about objectivity in journalism.

Now, we’ve got another hot-button issue to tackle: Private or Public? In exchange for your contributions on this topic we will let you fund the reporting project of your choice. It’s our budget, but your decision — thanks to our sponsor Free Press.

While a large chunk of the mainstream media is privately owned (Rupert Murdoch of Fox News), public forms of media have existed for quite some time and enjoy a healthy, albeit cult-like following of users.

In this time of transition, questions have come up about the role that public media should play in journalism’s future. Should it expand to cover the gaps left in the shrinking private news business? Can it expand without government support and would this be compromising?

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Greetings readers and fans. As you know, I’ve been covering the BP oil spill for the past three months, and working for several years on ways to fund the alternative, independent Web Press in the South.

A number of readers have expressed an interesting in helping, and some have mailed checks and made online contributions through our PayPal Donate button link.

We’ve been in talks for several months with David Cohn, the founder of Spot.us in San Francisco, the first online organization that came up with a business model and a Web interface to fund the kind of investigative journalism that has been falling by the wayside since newspapers suffered drastic budget cutbacks due to the Bush recession.

In the past couple of days, Spot.Us approved our pitch to experiment with raising online cash to help fund our efforts to continue covering the aftermath of BP’s massive Gulf oil spill, now that the mainstream media has lost interest in the story and the cable news helicopters have gone back to New York, Washington and Atlanta.

The effects of this spill will be around for weeks, months, years and maybe even decades, and we believe the story should continue to stay atop the news agenda.

Many readers have asked us how they can help. Here’s a very real opportunity for YOU to HELP for FREE! See below…

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Locust Fork News-Journal Editor Glynn Wilson Chosen First from the South

Glynn Wilson is the first free-lance journalist from the American South chosen to participate in a citizen-funded investigative journalism program that has proved successful on the West Coast.

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change” and funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation. They partner with various organizations including the Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

It is an open source project to pioneer “community powered reporting.”

Through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.

Contributions are tax deductible and they partner with news organizations to distribute content under appropriate licenses.

On some occasions they can even pay back the original contributors.

Spot.Us is a platform that can be used by other news organizations to fundraise for their freelancers.

Below are just some of the news organizations that have used Spot.Us to fund reporting projects. Their content is also made available for news outlets to republish.

Featured partners they’ve worked with include….

The New York Times

They sent a reporter to the Pacific Garbage Patch who chronicled her voyage and published a final story in The New York Times.

As it happens, that was the first free-lance story to carry a byline by the author ever published in the New York Times Science section not written by a former staff correspondent. When I worked for the National Desk and the Science Desk of the New York Times between 2002 and 2005, they did not give bylines to free-lancers.

More Examples

Click here to read what the press is saying about it.

Hello friends. We are still in need of funding sources to continue providing the most insightful and comprehensive coverage on the Web of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Consider making a donation today in lieu of a newspaper subscription fee to keep us on the MoJo road. I’m headed for New Orleans this weekend and have a few surprises in store. Simply click on the PayPal Donation button below. You don’t have to have a PayPal account to contribute.

BlogAds.Com launched a new program today that pays bloggers who bring advertisers to other blogs.

This is a great example of building the economy for the Web Press from one of the oldest, first companies in the country to develop a working business model for Web advertising.

You can see a short video describing how the new function works here.

Due to a recent hacking incident by Karl Rove’s minions in Asia, we recently had to restore the entire archives from backup files.

In the process of doing this over the past couple of days, the re-install and Word Press upgrade lost e-mail subscriber info and most likely comment info. So if you want to continue receiving e-mail alerts when new content is posted, you will need to sign up again on the tab at your right under Subscribe to Email Alerts. Once you make a comment and the first one is approved by the moderator, you will be able to make comments at will just like before.

For our Facebook fans, we will no longer be using the Networked blog app, so you will just have to follow the links and read the blog on our site. There is an indication that some of the vulnerabilities that led to the hacking incident came from too much of an open sharing relationship with Facebook. If this happens again, we may have to eliminate the Share button as well.

Since we are now in the latest version of Word Press, however, the site should fly like never before.

As always, if you want to help support the alternative, independent Web Press, there’s always that Donate button on the right. Happy surfing…

Due to another surge in traffic due to our intense coverage of the Gulf Coast under threat from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill and slick, the pencil pushers have upped our rates a tad. If you want exposure on this alternative, independent Web Press, get in on these deals now. They might be going up soon when we open the Gulf Shores bureau : )

See the New Blog Ad Rates Below

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