3 to read: Making journalism crowd funding work | Finding subscribers | What Jill Abramson got wrong

Jan. 26, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

How The Correspondent became the largest journalism crowdfunding project in history — without 1 story on its site: News sites are increasingly turning to readers to be their financial saviors. But it’s not easy. So here’s a fascinating look at how The Correspondent patiently and carefully laid the groundwork for raising $2.6 million from more than 45,000 supporters. For people interested in starting their own crowd-funded news sites, this is a primer on how to do it well. Great story by Emily Goligoski and Aron Pilhofer for MembershipPuzzle.org.

How many paying subscribers do you need to keep a money-losing magazine afloat? A regional mag finds out: The digital age has not been kind to regional magazine, which at one point were fat, happy money-makers. Now they’re hanging on by their fingertips. So when Arkansas Magazine announced it would shut down if it didn’t get enough paid subscribers, the staff jumped in, pushing hard on social media. Here’s what happened. By Laura Hazard Owens for Nieman Lab.

What Jill Abramson gets wrong about the digital journalism: Abramson, the first female executive editor of the NYT, has written a book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” It’s a take on four big media players — the NYT, WaPo, Vice, and BuzzFeed, where media is headed, and her own bitter falling-out with the NYT. But apparently she had trouble wrangling the truth down about Vice and BuzzFeed. An angry war of tweets has erupted over what reporters at Vice and BuzzFeed claim are errors in the book. As Josephine Livingstone chronicles for The New Republic, it’s not a pretty. But it makes an interesting read.

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