Homicide Watch Venture Struggles to Survive
Journalism has a shortage of many things: capital, advertisers and, in some instances, readers. But certainly its most precious commodity is innovation.
Katherine Taylor for The New York Times
Laura and Chris Amico, the founders of Homicide Watch, check their progress in securing funds on Kickstarter.
Again and again, the business struggles to get out of the rut that put it on a road to ruin in the first place. Consider the fate of the Web site Homicide Watch DC. When it popped up out of nowhere with a way of tracking every murder in Washington, it seemed likely that a big news organization would snap it up or that foundations would trip over themselves to shove money at them.
It hasn't turned out that way. Two years after it began, Homicide Watch is on hiatus and its founders, Laura and Chris Amico, find themselves with the tin cup out on Kickstarter looking for money to sustain the site.
At the heart of Homicide Watch is its mission statement: "Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case." It's a remarkable thing to behold — part database, part news site, it also serves as a kind of digital memorial for homicide victims in Washington. Their pictures are published, their cases are followed and their deaths are acknowledged as a meaningful event in the life of the city.
Neither The Washington Post nor the weekly Washington City Paper covers homicide comprehensively — come to think of it, almost no major newspaper does. It is difficult but important work that current business models won't accommodate, and Homicide Watch reaches an underserved community, since most of the victims are black.
But even though it has received all kinds of notice in the press and went from 500 page views a month to more than 300,000, it remained the handiwork of a wife and husband team.
"We reached a tipping point about nine months ago, when I think everybody just assumed we had been funded because of the buzz and coverage," Laura Amico said. "But the fact of the matter is, no one was funding it but us. We have this high visibility, but every door that we knocked on was closed to us."
The couple applied three times for financing from the Knight News Challenge and also sought grants from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and J-Lab's New Media Women Entrepreneurs and several others, including some nonjournalism foundations. Each time they came away empty.
You could blame it on the topic — murder is not anybody's idea of a sexy topic for a Web site — but as Mr. Amico pointed out, newspapers have been using crime news to attract big audiences for a long time, so it's more complicated than that. Neither hyper-local, which was all the rage for a while, nor strictly investigative, which is often a magnet for financing, the site didn't fit neatly into the pigeon holes that foundations have at the ready. Like the victims it covers, Homicide Watch ended up falling through the cracks.
I thought about Homicide Watch when I read Alan D. Mutter's recent post about the big chunks of financing that are going to tiny experimental outfits named The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. In May, the Ford Foundation gave The Times $ 1 million over two years to hire five reporters to cover ethnic and prison issues even though the paper is owned by the Tribune Company, which may be in bankruptcy but has amassed nearly $ 2.4 billion in cash during its three and a half years in court.
In July, the foundation awarded The Washington Post $ 500,000 for government accountability reporting.
The moves, while laudable in terms of intent, create an odd hybrid — a news organization that runs as a business, but has a pod of reporters who are financed on a different model, and presumably, operate under different rules. For example, reporting financed by the foundation must be free to all and available for reuse without copyright, an anomaly at The Times, which has a pay wall.
Alfred Ironside, director of communications at the Ford Foundation, said there was nothing unusual about a foundation working with a profit-making enterprise and that it was a well-established practice in the current tax code.
"The good news is we are funding all sorts of things in journalism," he said, ticking off a list of grants to organizations like ProPublica, The Chicago Reporter, the Center for Public Integrity and GlobalPost. "Our approach in this evolving media landscape is to think about how we can support meaningful and sustainable journalism that reaches a broad audience."
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