MuckRock Projects will pay for FOIA requests and reporting alike

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MuckRock has always allowed users to make collective records requests but now the platform is going to invite people to crowdfund the reporting and journalism to answer the questions those documents provoke.

“We’ve been using Projects internally for a few weeks, and it’s made it much easier to stay on the same page with sprawling stories and to quickly get an at-a-glance view of where things stand,” said founder Michael Morisy. “We can’t wait to see what you do with them.”

The first Projects campaign will focus on expanding the investigative work Beryl Lipton has done on the Private Prisons industry, raising $4,000 for request fees and by funding on-the-ground reporting in towns that host the prisons.

Since its founding in 2010, roughly 40 records requests have been crowdfunded on MuckRock while others were done with partners like Beacon and others.

As they tend to do, Nieman Lab took a closer look at Lipton’s reporting and Projects.

Next week Through the Cracks will publish an interview to pick his brain about the gamification of investigative journalism.


Stay tuned.

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Khari Johnson
Khari is founder and editor of Through the Cracks: Crowdfunding in Journalism. He also writes about bots and artificial intelligence for VentureBeat. He has built news startups in the U.S. and Europe for the last decade.

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