Scoop Is Crowd Funding - Help Scoop.co.nz To Fly In 2015

Wednesday, 18 February 2015, 1:58 pm
Article: Scoop Operation Chrysalis

At Scoop we believe that access to independent news and investigative journalism is a public right that is essential for democracy to thrive. But it is a public right that is eroding. Digital technology now enables a business model to be developed that makes news freely accessible to all citizens, and in which the news apparatus itself can be transparent. Creating this new kind of news organisation is what "Operation Chrysalis" is all about. We are taking a bold step to preserve the public right to access news.

We plan to transform into a not-for-profit media organisation held for the benefit of all NZers, accountable to the community of news communicators and consumers it serves.

Scoop is NZ's oldest and largest independent online news service. We have described ourselves as fiercely independent for more than a decade and we would like to stay that way. For 16 years we have honoured NZers participation in Scoop through commitment to public good purposes and holding the powerful to account.

This year, like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly we want to grow wings and fly. By making Scoop’s connection to the public and contributors more explicit we hope to achieve the level of support and sustainability that will enable Scoop to fly as a community asset.

Scoop is seeking one-off funding of $30,000 to enable this transformation

We - the Scoop family - are seeking your financial support to help facilitate the gift of Scoop.co.nz from its current owners to a new structure.

Our initial target in this campaign is for $30,000 and that money will be used to:

• Consult with the parties who will become guardians of Scoop in public ownership;
• Recruit, induct and establish a new leadership team of social entrepreneurs who will ultimately take on responsibility for piloting THE NEW SCOOP into the next decade;
• Support the refocusing of Scoop's business activities towards providing value added services to our communications clients.

( Click Here For FAQ Answers - E.G. Who are the parties? What will guardianship look like? Where will the new leadership team be found? Why are they needed? or Submit A Question )

Short answer. Because it already works and provides you with free access to news you can use. It is a proven foundation capable of protecting access to news as a public right in a very efficient fashion.

Scoop is already addressing the information deficit that the internet’s disruption of traditional media is causing. With a large and influential audience, deep connections into the emerging NZ digital news media scene, and close relationships with civil society, Scoop is the best opportunity to build a new kind of news service, fit for the 21st century.

Each work day Scoop and its sub-sites publish around 230 pages, a combination of editorial submissions, news reports, multi-media content, press releases and speeches. With 4 million inbound links and a similar number of outbound links Scoop is a very large distributor of Google authority - making the rest of the NZ web more discoverable via search. When Scoop publishes a press release it is made available to an audience of over 250,000 NZers each month, an online readership comparable with that of the state owned broadcaster Radio New Zealand.

Scoop has been a collaborative project for 16 years.

Through publishing the public statements of anyone and everyone we have brought together nearly every New Zealand institution and a host of politicians, NGOs, social activist and businesses. Scoop has become the default online information highway connecting NZ's Parliament, its Governmental agencies, the business community and civil society. In doing so it has enabled each of these important parts of NZ society to know what each other is doing - as well as all of the rest of us. Scoop also provides an exceedingly useful, and freely publicly accessible, 700,000 page, full-text 15-years-deep news database fully indexed by Google, thereby providing the most accessible repository of fact-checking information available on the NZ web. This assists us all to participate in decisions which affect us on an informed basis.

Scoop is about empowerment, plurality of viewpoints, debate and equality of access to the fruits of the information age.

Scoop is a big-tent, a home to all views (provided they are not defamatory or denigrating). Our mission is "to be an agent of positive change" and for 16 years we have sought to achieve this mission by providing every voice in NZ access to a platform to express themselves, and every news consumer an insider's view of the news creation process. This contrasts with traditional media entities which are about curating content and gate-keeping messages.

Well known media commentator Russell Brown and long time Scoop ally has described Scoop as the "Home of NZ's National Argument", a description which aptly describes the role that Scoop plays in NZ society. Scoop’s readers visit Scoop mostly while working and many are involved with the central nervous system of NZ decision making. We know from our reader survey that these readers find Scoop, important and valuable to their work and very reliable. We also know from this survey that they overwhelmingly consider that maintaining access to a resource such as Scoop is an important public good objective.

In the event that you our readers, clients and supporters get into the spirit of “Operation Chrysalis” and we quickly reach our target goal there is more we can offer if we can raise more money!

We have some stretch goals to our fundraising which will enable us to do some of the things that we know from our reader and client survey that you want us to do.

If we raise more than $50,000 in this campaign we will immediately BEGIN WORK on a responsive design ( i.e. mobile device friendly) refresh of the Scoop website.

If we raise more than $70,000 in this campaign we will immediately begin work on some enhanced features to provide greater value to our contributors and community. For example:

1. Integrating new tools to enable contributors to amplify their news via social networks and online, and tools to send news to targetted traditional media organisations;
2. Develop new tools to provide a) analytics on the readership of each contributor's content & b) trace the propagation of news ideas through the internet.
3. Build "news curation" tools to enable engaged readers to add value to Scoop content.

If we raise more than $100,000 in this campaign we will COMPLETE a stage one responsive design refresh in 2015.

[Note: We will consult with our readers and clients before we proceed with these projects. We want to allocate our innovation resources to what our community wants.]

Running in parallel with our Crowdfunding campaign, Scoop's business development team are conducting a sales drive for Scoop’s commercial services

Scoop sells a range of commercial information products (other than advertising) which you can buy and which provide significant additional value to professional communications and communicators. Yet, perhaps because Scoop’s free offerings are so useful, we have struggled to achieve a broad enough base of commercial relationships.

Through the changes to Scoop's ownership being made as part of "Operation Chrysalis", Scoop seeks to create a new basis for our relationship with our valued clients. Our hope is that businesses, NGOs and news consumers alike will be more comfortable about sharing their content, and also investing their precious communications resources in a community owned social enterprise which:

• delivers them value,
• is accountable to the community not shareholders,
• reinvests its profits in building better services and more quality news, and
• has a social purpose at its heart and cannot be bought by the highest bidder.

If you are a business user of Scoop who routinely uses Scoop for business purposes, or whose press releases Scoop regularly publishes we would love to hear from you so we can pitch our business solutions to you. Please contact Steven Wood or Alastair Thompson at sales@scoop.co.nz. You will see in the rewards section on the Pledgeme page that you can also purchase Scoop services (at a discounted rate) through this pledgeme campaign.

Scoop is a small and highly efficient operation. The Scoop Team is led by co-founder, Editor & Publisher Alastair Thompson, a journalist with 26 years of experience reporting mainly on politics and business. For the past decade Scoop’s production and front page story selection has been primarily managed by News Editor Lyndon Hood a stellar satirist who in his spare time is an improv performer. Sales and customer relations have been the department of Business Development Manager Steven Wood for the past 5 and half years. Probably the best known member of the Scoop editorial team is legendary reporter and Political Editor Gordon Campbell who splits his time between Scoop and his own editorial magazine project Werewolf.co.nz. The editorial team is rounded out with Duty Editor Jackie Little, Wellington Scoop Editor Lindsay Shelton who edits the Wellington.scoop.co.nz website and Editorial Intern Jeremy Wilkinson. (NOTE: Scoop also publishes several websites in joint ventures with other media companies and bloggers including ParliamentToday.co.nz (with InHouse Broadcasting) , Pacific.scoop.co.nz (with AUT's Pacific Media Center) , Community.scoop.co.nz (with Comm Voices) and Business.scoop.co.nz (with BusinessDesk) and Books.scoop.co.nz (with Alison McCulloch).

Finally, as this campaign is at its heart about forming a stronger engagement with our community. Here are few of the current opportunities to engage with us :

• Join our online Loomio Community to discuss the future of Scoop with us and fellow readers and clients & Discuss about the State of NZ News Media or Join the Scoop Supporters Crew.
• Email us a "Why I supported Scoop" paragraph to add to our big wall of endorsements.
• Sign up to Scoop's professional filtered news-by-email Newsagent service.
• Sign up to Scoop's free news by email Newsagent service.
• Find your byline and register your Scoop Infopage.
• Follow Scoop on Twitter.
• Follow Operation Chrysalis on Twitter.
• Sign Up For Operation Chrysalis and State of NZ News Media Alerts
• Do the Scoop Reader Survey
• Like Scoop On Facebook.

Please support Scoop’s "Operation Chrysalis" to help reinvent Scoop.co.nz - NZ's best opportunity to build a news service fit for the 21st century. Please help Scoop to create a future-proofed news media which reflects NZ's values and serves its needs.

ENDS

© Scoop Media

The Scoop Foundation

The Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism

The Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism is a charitable trust and the legal heart of the New Scoop project. The foundation is the owner of The New Scoop Publishing Company (www.scoop.co.nz).

The purposes of the Scoop Foundation are to promote, encourage and generate funding for investigative and public interest journalism.

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