Launching THE LA JUSTICE REPORT

---

THE PARTNERSHIP

Spot.Us and WitnessLA.com have launched an extremely cool new partnership we’re calling The LA Justice Report ….

…And we’d like your help.

The idea is to fund and investigate local social justice stories that we believe are far too important to be allowed to go unexamined.

Our first story is called Follow the Gang Money: How is LA Using Our $25 Million?

But more about that in a minute.

---

THE PARTNERS

Spot.Us launched in 2008, the brainchild of digital media wunderkind David Cohn. It is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change” funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation, and it partners with the Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

Cohn’s idea was to pioneer “community powered reporting.” Roughly translated that means that, through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics.

The first Spot.Us network opened in the Bay Area and drew a committed following of community members willing to fund local news coverage that was being otherwise vaporized in the ongoing media meltdown. Average people donated toward stories they cared about in increments of $20, $30 and $50.

More recently, Spot.Us has brought its model to LA, headed by second generation journalist/editor Anh Do, who has worked as vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S., the Dallas Morning News, the Seattle Times, and the Orange County Register for 12 years. (For Anh’s full bio go here.) Spot.Us has has now launched a Seattle network as well.

As most of you know, WitnessLA started in March of 2007 with a grant from the Justice and Journalism Fund—our intention to cover the social justice issues in Los Angeles that were increasingly being overlooked or ignored as the traditional news business moved ever deeper into crisis.

In the three years between then and now, we’ve broken some stories that no one else was covering, and tried to bring context and a human face to social justice issues where ever we found them. In the process, we’ve drawn a wide array of readers and gotten a couple of nice awards for our efforts.

Given our individual purposes, a joint effort between Spot.Us and WitnessLA that would merge our strengths in the social justice arena seemed to be a no-brainer.

Hence The LA Justice Report: Community funded social justice reporting.

---

THE CONCEPT

The way it will work is that, using their community donation model, LA Spot.us will raise the funds for investigative reporting projects that will be overseen and published by WitnessLA, with input from Spot.Us. In the next few weeks we intend to add a third partner in the form of a Spanish language media outlet to widen the reach of the stories we will be telling.

The assignment below –—FOLLOW THE GANG MONEY: HOW IS LA USING OUR $25 MILLION? — is the LA JUSTICE REPORT’s first investigation.

Matt Fleischer is the team’s first investigative reporter.

---

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Right now, you can help one of two ways:

1. There’s the obvious: If one of the stories we list seems important to you, you can donate a few bucks. (TO DO SO CLICK HERE.) The idea is for a lot of people to put in just a little..

2. FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS only, you can help by taking a three-question anonymous survey for a Spot.US sponsor and get $5 to donate to ours or any other story. It’ll take you about three minutes and costs nothing to do. Just go to SPOT.US and hit the green EARN CREDITS button and follow the prompts. You’ll have to register (which only means SPOT.US will know you, not the sponsor). We’re hoping to fund the Follow the Gang Money series by the end of the day—at no cost.

For now, read the rundown on our first investigation below.