On “Crowdfunding” War Reporting

"Ivor Tossell has featured me in an article for The Globe and Mail:

Crowdfunding is kind of like fundraising, but with authority issues. The word comes from the term “crowdsourcing,” which refers to asking the crowd to do a piece of work at your behest. Similarly, crowdfunding wants to bring democracy to the art of drumming up cash by getting a lot of people to contribute a bit of money to a cause. Typically, that can be anything from charities to musicians.
But war reporters? That’s a new twist for the Internet …

Axe isn’t the first freelancer to appeal directly to readers for funding. GNN had previously appealed to readers’ wallets to subsidize another reporter’s 2005 trip to Lebanon. Meanwhile, bloggers like Michael Yon, a former American soldier who’s now an embedded freelancer in Iraq, are making ends meet with the help of direct donations from readers. With adventures like these, reporters like Axe are bypassing traditional outlets and trying to do a direct transaction with the public: Our money for his reporting.

War is Boring

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