– On the credit/blame issue, I still feel like Spot.us passively not taking credit for the quality (as in the "Travel expenses were paid by … " credit line on the NYT story) is not the same as Spot.us proactively denying credit for quality when others heap praise on Spot.us for a good piece, and therefore not on the same level as proactively denying blame for the quality. However, I'm content to leave this argument behind. That was always only a minor point for me anyway.

– I do, however, have issue with the assertion that the quality of the piece won't have been held under a microscope as much had it been a traditional freelance or staff NYT article. Has the piece received more scrutiny than your typical NYT article? Yes, because it was high profile, just as any article that has a lot of buzz and anticipating surrounding it, for whatever reason, invariably receives more attention. Was the piece held to a higher standard than your typical NYT piece? I can't speak for others, but for myself, that answer is no. Everything I've written on here, I would've written regardless of who wrote it or how it was funded. The standards by which I judge a work of journalism did not shoot up because of those factors. I did not hold Lindsey to a higher standard than I would an NYT staff writer or traditionally funded freelancer. As for the transparency of the project adding to the scrutiny, I would say it added to the scrutiny in that we knew how much money was spent on it, putting the cost-benefit of the project in context. It has nothing to do with the fact that it was a non-traditionally funded piece. If the NYT had sent its own staff writer to produce the same deliverables and told us that so-and-so spent $10k and 3 weeks on a boat reporting on the patch, with the focus supposedly being the human connection, I would have the exact same critique.

– You wrote, "I think there is this assumption that somehow a journalist is to create a definitive piece on a subject. That there is going to be a "tada" moment and the world will know some objective truth." But I wasn't expecting a definitive piece. I wasn't expecting her to provide a "tada" moment, because I agree with you that journalism is a process. I judged this project based on whether it furthered that process. I asked only, "Did it add something new to the discussion?" But so far, the process of her reporting has only basically caught us up to where we already were in the discussion. The NYT story is basically the same overview that has already been written before. The slideshow is nice, but as I pointed out in my updates, we already have pictures from the patch, so how much would a few more, however beautiful, add to the discussion and our understanding of the patch? The blog is a good read, and you can argue that it added a first-person perspective to the discussion. But if that first-person, travel-blog-type perspective was all that your project was going to add to the discussion, it would seem like there are considerably less expensive ways to go about getting that (like getting a research expedition to blog about their experiences, as I said in one of my updates), and use the $10,000 for her to produce something that cannot be as easily had (like finding out more details about the human connection).

I understand your point about the future impact the funding for this project may have, and if Lindsey goes on to do more great reporting about the patch, then yes, Spot.us absolutely deserves some of the credit for enabling a project at the beginning of that process. However, the possibility of more future returns should not prevent one from evaluating the process so far. And so far, I would say the process has not YET yielded enough return to justify the financial investment. If Lindsey produces more and better path-related reporting in the coming months, that assessment will obviously change. Also, consider this point: If the money had gone to pay for Lindsey to investigate the science behind the patch rather than to fund her trip to the patch, will that preclude her from doing more future reporting about the patch? I would say not. And if that's the case, then you could have gotten more out of your process so far and still have the same potential for future benefits.

To the first comment:

"When a Spot.us piece receives such positive attention, every time that piece is mentioned on your site or by others as an accomplishment by Spot.us, will you be voluntarily adding, "Remember, Spot.us is only the platform that funded it and had nothing to do with the quality of the content", as you did in the comments on the CJR thread? If you will, then I'll apologize for having doubts. And I sincerely hope you get the chance to prove it."

Actually: The NYT piece received lots of positive attention as well and our response is the same. We didn't use that exact quote "Spot.Us is only the platform etc etc etc" – but it is very clearly written at the bottom of the NYT piece: "Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists." — that is the credit Spot.Us deserves and that is the credit we got. We funded the trip. We never claimed more. So all the folks that did like it – we deserve positive attention for making it happen, yes. But Lindsey and the Times deserve credit for anything about the editorial that people appreciated blog, photos, etc.

As for the journalism – I think you lay out a lot of good points. I wonder however if any of this discussion about the quality of the reporting would have come up had this been a traditional freelance or staff Times article. Probably not.

That the piece has been held under a microscope because of how transparent the process has been from start to finish is very interesting. I think there is this assumption that somehow a journalist is to create a definitive piece on a subject. That there is going to be a "tada" moment and the world will know some objective truth.

That isn't how the world works. That isn't how journalism works.

Journalism is a process and all the critiques are just adding to that process. So the more we talk about this – the more valuable those original donations actually become. Discussion about topics is healthy. That is how communities get informed. Lindsey championed this topic and as a result that many more people are talking, debating, questioning, etc. That actually pushes the story forward more than any single article ever could IMHO because the more people engaged – the more actual change happens.

Not sure if that is making 100% sense right now in my semi-sleep state: But a fundamental theory of my journalism career is that "journalism is a process, not a product." That has been the tagline to my personal blog for…. maybe 2-3 years now. Some of the truth of that has come out in all of this, at least for me….. Even if Spot.Us' funding of Lindsey's trip is done – the discussion and hopefully her future career will result. Should Spot.Us take credit for the quality of the discussion or the quality of Lindsey's future career? Of course not: But we were platform from which all this could jump. For that – I consider it a HUGE success.

My feeling on that front is that, as a donor (and a paying customer in what is essentially a financial transaction), one would feel like they didn't get what was promised in the proposal, not in the sense that they were promised good journalism and this wasn't good enough, but in the sense that the end product didn't do the things the proposal said it'll do. To draw a parallel, this isn't someone telling me, "I'll design a web site for you" and then me being unhappy with the quality of their work. Rather, this is like someone telling me they'll create a database-driven site with a CMS but then delivering a site that's all static HTML. The delivered product may be great, but it's not what I thought I was paying for.

The pitch for this project specifically said it'll focus on the human connection, but there's relatively little about that in the blog or the NYT story. And this is something that's quantifiable, not a matter of opinion. In my view, that is a problem because the human connection focus was pitched as the unique value this project would deliver — something that distinguished it from previous coverage of the patch and a reason why it's worth funding even though there were already many other garbage patch stories. Yet the end result is something that's far closer to what had been done previously in terms of how much (or little) it deals with the human connection. If I thought that was done intentionally (which I don't), I would be calling this a bait-and-switch.

To me, a more appropriate pitch for what ended up being produced would be: A first-person travel blog chronicling an expedition to the garbage patch, a slideshow, and an NYT story giving a general overview about the patch. Such a proposal offers something with much less unique value than the human connection angle — in essence, it's proposing a travel blog on top of rehashed existing information. If she got $6k to fund that proposal, I'd give her a pad on the back and say "Good job!" and have no issues with this. Or maybe I'm wrong here and most of the 116 people who helped fund this project were expecting pretty much what they got. If I see donor feedback data that demonstrates that, then I'll also be ok with it.

And yes, I recognize that her reporting on this may not be over, and that's great. As I said in one of my comments above, I hope she'll keep digging. However, as you yourself said, Spot.us is done funding her trip. If the delivery of all the proposed deliverables and the conclusion of funding cannot be used as a point at which to evaluate a project, then how would you ever be able to actually measure the effectiveness of your platform? As a former journalist myself, I'm no stranger to the concept of something possessing unquantifiable value, but I think we both also know that you do need something more concrete than that in performance evaluation. Besides, along that same vein, if the piece had drawn rave reviews, can we not say, "Well, let's wait 10 years and see if any of the stuff she reported is proven incorrect and then judge the project's merit"?

Thanks again for the discussion. If you have more thoughts to share on this later once you've had a chance to catch your breath, I'm here with open ears and open mind. And keep up the good work.

To clarify, when I talked about some of the backlash being oversensitivity to criticism of anything new media, I did not mean to include you in that (even if your comments on the CJR piece did come off as defensive at times), since I've seen you talk candidly in the past about things you feel Spot.us needs to do better, including better quality. The comments on the CJR piece that spurred my remark about oversensitivity were the ones by others who resorted to tactics such as trying to turn the issue into an MSM/old media vs. new media thing. Of course I can't prove that those are results of thin-skinness, but when you see those symptoms repeatedly in many other different venues, you at least begin to suspect.

As for the credit/blame issue, as much as I want to believe Spot.us won't take credit for award-winning work, I think Chris Anderson's comment (which I didn't see until after I wrote this post) is still valid: You may not proactively claim credit for producing the work, but surely you will hold it up as examples of good work enabled by your platform — in short, as good PR for Spot.us. When a Spot.us piece receives such positive attention, every time that piece is mentioned on your site or by others as an accomplishment by Spot.us, will you be voluntarily adding, "Remember, Spot.us is only the platform that funded it and had nothing to do with the quality of the content", as you did in the comments on the CJR thread? If you will, then I'll apologize for having doubts. And I sincerely hope you get the chance to prove it.

But to start: The only thing that bugs me about the comments in all of this is the idea that I or spot.us has thin skin. I think it's totally fine to be taken to town. I also think it's fine for us to take those who take us to town…. to town

I also think it's possible for that to fly both ways without any venom flying around. I know in my first comment on CJR I was a bit hasty – but I have tried to apologize for that as well…. as I started this comment off: I feel like all I've been doing the ast 24 hours is running around.

So I'll try and circle back to this post more later.

Until then: Be well. Also – I did respond to the "if this had been a sterling piece of journalism would spot.us take credit for it." in the CJR thread. Basically it goes like this.

No. We wouldn't take credit for it.

Would we hold up the person who did an award winning piece of journalism who used our platform: Of course. They used our platform.

Would we disown a person who didn't do award winning work no. We wouldn't disown them. I'm sure we wouldn't be able to hold them up in the air and cheer and if that's what we are doing with Lindsey and it turns out the work isn't that good. Fine.

But – lots of other folks do think it's good.

You can't please everyone and it's especially hard to please journalists when they are critiquing journalism.

As for me: I just want to stay focused on what we need to do. Improve the platform so that more folks like Lindsey can do their work.

Final thought and I think this is key (really running out the door).

Just as the critique of Megan's piece was that it judged the NY Times piece in a vacuum and ignored the blog (until people pointed that out) – it might be too early to judge Lindsey's work on this. Gratned: Spot.Us is done funding her trip (obviously) she is now out pitching more and doing more. She actually wants to do an infographic, she wants to do follow up reporting, etc etc. If anything – perhaps we enabled the start of a career… if that is the case. There might be no way to measure the good that was done by this project.

Best

I would bang on here, but It needs an article and graphs, so I'm going to get a post up on layscience.net tonight, and I'll post a link here when I'm done if you or your readers are interested….

I wonder if a reporter who didn't go out there would have been more critical? I did find it extremely puzzling that Hoshaw didn't talk to any non-AMRF scientists.