We’ve been offered $100k — help us claim it

Craig Newmark & The News Integrity Initiative are offering to match every penny pledged to WikiTribune, up to an amazing $100,000

It’s only been a couple of days since we announced a $50,000 grant from Korean tech firm ESV, but we’ve already got two more potential wins to share with you. And we need your help to make them happen.

Craig Newmark, aka ‘Craig from craigslist’, and Jeff Jarvis of the News Integrity Initiative (NII), have both agreed to match your pledges to WikiTribune dollar-for-dollar up to $50,000. That’s a potential pot of $100,000, but it all depends on how much support we get from the public.

Craig is supporting WikiTribune through the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund as part of his craigconnects project, whose slogan is “Helping people do good work that matters.”

Asked why he believes WikiTribune meets that description, Craig told us:

“Regular people need a way to get trustworthy reporting in areas that conventional media won’t touch and won’t update.

“I think we need good faith, unsensational reporting, with follow-up.

“We’re all in this together, and we all need skin in this game.”

Obviously, we agree.

Jeff Jarvis does too. As a professor of journalism and director of the Tow-Knight Centre for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), he oversees the News Integrity Initiative. It’s a pioneering project that unites names like Facebook and the Ford Foundation to create:

“A global consortium focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online. The Initiative’s mission is to advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world, and to better inform the public conversation.”

That aligns with our ambitions pretty well — hence why they’re backing us–but we still need your help to claim the cash.

Whether you support us with $10, $100 or the spare change you found in your jeans, your money will be matched 100% by Craig or the NII. So if you pledge a penny, we’ll receive two. And that’s two pennies we can put towards creating the collaborative platform that will fix the news.

We have just over a week left to go, and now that every pledge counts for double, we’re more confident than ever of reaching our goal. To help us get there, please keep adding your support, sharing our posts and spreading the word — the future of news lies with you.