Michelle Carter is an award-winning journalist turned marketing and public relations consultant with over 15 years of industry experience. She has a deep understanding of how broken the news industry is, from both sides of the fence.
Years of losses and cuts have lead to fewer journalists covering much larger beats. As they struggle to keep up with the constant demand for fresh content, the product becomes predictably worse: Advertorials and sponsored content are harder to distinguish. Aggregated content from other sources is reposted unverified. Press releases get passed off as news. Headlines are written as click bait. Much of the product is irrelevant. The influence of advertisers and editors on content has never been greater- neither has the public’s mistrust of the news industry.
NewsFundr was created by journalists to fundamentally change how local news is produced- putting the power in the hands of readers, not advertisers and power brokers. NewsFundr allows readers to subscribe directly journalists and pay only for the news they trust. Journalists choose their own beat and are never assigned stories. Journalists can also use crowdfunding to support more expensive investigations, and include information like source documents and unedited interviews along with their stories, so readers can fact-check stories themselves.
Readers can also support news freedom by subscribing to the NewsFundr Legal Defense Fund and the News Fund. The NewsFundr Legal Defense Fund helps journalists who need to use the courts to gain access to public information, who are detained in the course of their work, or find themselves subject to litigation because of their work, etc. The NewsFund provides grants to journalists who are reporting on underserved areas.
Learn more: NewsFundr.com @TheNewsFundr Facebook.com/NewsFundr