What is the shape of crowdfunding calls for Journalism? A content analysis of projects on Kickstarter (2010-2018)

Abstract

The media landscape has drastically changed during the past decade with the emergence of new models and platforms allowing citizens to become amateur journalists and news publishers. Alongside traditional players, newcomers and do-it-yourself initiatives emerged in the market with the help of platforms that seek to connect with a potential audience and offer alternative funding means, such as crowdfunding. Success cases and innovative examples abound in the literature, often on a case-based analysis, showing the potential of this funding model to support local projects and investigative journalism. It is the aim of this paper to descriptively unveil the characteristics of such crowdfunding calls via a content analysis using the Kickstarter website, as this is generally a representative case of the reward-based crowdfunding model worldwide. This study contributes to discuss not only the features of calls but, furthermore, to which extent crowdfunding seems to bring about novel ways of creating and sharing content.