David Cohn (Spot.Us Founder): “becoming indispensable”

As (somehow)  mentioned before, I recently joined the “Town Twinning 2.0 – Program“.  The project is a cooperation between the Chair in Journalism and Communication Studies (International Media Programmes) at the University of Hamburg and the Department of International Journalism of St. Petersburg State University.

Six Russian, two German and not at least one charming Spanish Journalism student(s) jointly explored the trading and medial capital Hamburg: We interviewed, investigated, reported and researched. As a special tidbit, we had the honour to cover the 17th World Editors Forum in Hamburg hosted by the “World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers” with more than 700 participating journalists from 77 countries.

CLICK HERE to see some of our work on the editorsweblog.org or HERE to reconstruct some of the traffic (we generated) on twitter during the conference (#wefhamburg).

Moreover, the program offered several evening events as (e.g.) a get to together with First Mayor Christoph Ahlhaus at the townhall of Hamburg or a Flying Buffet at the Axel Springer Newspaper Devision.

The last mentioned event provided the opportunity to talk to David Cohn (in many places known as DigiDave), Spot.Us Founder and News Challenge winner. During the World Editors Forum, the Media entrepreneur presented his non-profit community-funded journalism site Spot.Us in a session on how to monetise journalism.

Spot.Us describes itself as “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 the plattform partners with news organizations to distribute content under appropriate licenses. In my opionion, Spot.Us is one of the leading innovations to establish high-quality journalism within the didital cloud – and perhaps “the gift” to simply keep this independent and unadjusted profession alive.

Meanwhile, this is why I was rather interested in Cohn’s thoughts on my education. So I took the gap and tried to – ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄHHHHMMMM – ask my questions regarding the role of “emerging” journalists within the changing media landscape:

Special thanks to:

David Cohn
Prof. Dr. Siegfried Weischenberg
Dr. Steffen Burkhardt
Swenja Kopp
Anna Litvinenko

… and – of course – the Team of Town Twinning 2.0.

Tags: David Cohn, Hamburg, journalism, Media, Spot.Us, Uni Hamburg, WAN-IFRA, World Editors Forum