Earlier this month, I talked about three enterprising Kickstarter campaigns — Outer Voices Podcast, Radio Ambulante, and The Independent Voice Project. Recently, another great journalism-focused project has started making news, and it’s called MATTER.

MATTER is the brain child of Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, two experienced reporters with a passion for making journalism better. Giles and Johnson have lined up a team of writers and editors to help push this vision forward, and according to the Kickstarter project page, MATTER will be for readers, not advertisers.

The “return to long-form journalism” is a phrase that has been bandied about for a few years now, and several websites currently exist around this premise (Longreads, The Atavist, Byliner, Longform, etc.) MATTER won’t be a curation service; rather, it will include original investigative reporting from their team of writers, some of which have contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, National Geographic, Nature and Wired.

“The thing about long-form, in-depth journalism is that it’s expensive. There used to be many more newspapers and magazines that produced that sort of content, but journalism is in financial trouble and those outlets have cut back,” said Giles.

The Kickstarter campaign will help raise funds for MATTER to produce their first three pieces. By pledging at the $25 level, you can join their editorial board (powered by All Our Ideas) and lend your voice to the kind of reporting MATTER covers.

As of this article, the project is over 60% funded, but you can pledge until the campaign ends on March 24, 2012. For more information about MATTER, you can visit their website at readmatter.com. You can also follow the progress of MATTER on Facebook and Twitter.

Kickstarter has emerged as the go-to platform for crowdfunding online. In 2011, they received nearly $100 million in pledges and over a million backers. With these numbers, crowdfunding through Kickstarter can be a great way to raise awareness about your project and build momentum around your cause.

Here are a just few great journalism proposals on Kickstarter which span a wide range of voices. Do your part and pledge your support to any or all of these campaigns! If there’s a Kickstarter campaign which focuses on journalism, please let us know!

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In the ongoing debate on journalist vs. blogger, a Portland judge’s recent ruling draws a clear distinction between the two. Crystal Cox, a self-identified investigative blogger, was sued by the investment firm Obsidian Finance Group for defamation. She wrote several articles that were highly critical of the firm’s co-founder Kevin Padrick, who told OregonLive.com “The damage to me is forever. The Internet is not capable of being undone.”

U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez decided that Cox is not entitled to protection under Oregon’s media shield law because she is not “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.” He disagrees with her self-identification as “media,” but goes on to say that even if she were entitled protection, it would not be granted due to the case being a “civil action for defamation.”

This case highlights the gap between our slow-to-change institutions and the always-changing Internet. As Matthew Ingram at GigaOm pointed out, there are “shield laws” in 40 states, “but some have been updated to include cover newer forms of media such as blogs, and others haven’t.” Just a little bit north in Washington state, Cox would’ve been protected by an expanded shield law. Read more

You may remember an article from The Wall Street Journal earlier this year which talked about the lucrativeness of selling video scoops directly to media outlets. The company at the center of this article was Citizenside, a French company created in 2006. Since then, the company has grown by leaps and bounds, most notably because of a 2007 partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP), one of the three largest news agencies in the world. This year, Citizenside also released their new smartphone app which lets users capture video and photos and upload them directly to the Citizenside website.

Citizenside’s global news coverage is the focus of their service. Most of the stories are based around events in Europe, with a good number of stories from Asia, North America, and South America. Members can add videos and photos directly from the Citizenside website, or they can use the Citizenside mobile apps. You can share your news images with Citizenside’s online community of global citizen reporters, leave comments, and share media to your social networks. Active members can also earn points for their submissions. The more your photo or video is seen, ranked, or commented, the more points you can earn. The highest ranked members of the month are featured on a monthly leaderboard.

Perhaps the largest benefit for joining and posting news to Citizenside is their commission program. Citizenside acts as a sales agent for their extensive network of print and online news outlets (300 in France and 7,000 internationally), and members can receive up to a 60% return on media sold to these outlets. Payment is delivered to members via PayPal within 60 days, and Citizenside maintains an exclusive three-month publishing license once media is uploaded to their service. If you are a buyer for a media agency and want to use any of the photos or videos offered on Citizenside, check out Citizenside Pro for more information.

Citizenside is currently available on both iOS and Android for free. Keep up with the Citizenside team by visiting them at http://www.citizenside.com/, or by following them on Facebook or Twitter.

Last week, I blogged about the Guardian’s experimental decision to share part of its newslists with the public. The move was somewhat risky. Traditionally, newspapers keep their lists of upcoming stories close to the vest in an effort to scoop the competition.

A little more than a week in, and the Guardian’s experiment is going well, writes Dan Roberts, the paper’s national editor. So well, in fact, that they are extending the process and including more sections of the paper in the newslists made public.

“… the remarkable thing about our experiment publishing the Guardian’s list of upcoming stories is why newspapers have been so secretive about such information for so long,” Roberts comments in the blog post. “Whatever competitive advantage may have been lost by giving rivals a clue what we were up to was more than made up for by a growing range of ideas and tips from readers.”

This begs the question: Should more newspapers/news organizations consider an open news approach?

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