Journals Proceedings

Abstract

In an uncertain environment for media companies, we believe that one of the key elements for their future is to develop strategies to fully-engage the audience, gain their trust and their participation in journalistic goods. Along with this, it seems desirable to set up transgressors models in which journalism is conceived not as a business but as a service to the community. The phenomenon of the crowdfunding can be highlighted here, in which citizens fund media formulas through micro donations at the time they claim a type of journalism that will act as an organic public service, free of economic and political interests. Very likely it is the critical audience who can better capture and release a new public journalistic culture. The fans that enable the publication of new media through donations also represent their own subcultures, habits and practices based on the relationship they built with the media and their texts. Once identified some of these most successful approaches in Spain (although it is still quite a minor trend) and the United Kingdom, in the present paper we have analyzed the experiences of this media when fragmenting the roles of professional and non-professional profiles involved in the journalistic creation process, conducting in-depth interviews with their creators and managers. The data have been completed by an analysis of the quality of the content posted by such this media financed by citizens. Through the integration of quantitative and qualitative methodology a greater scientific verification was achieved in the study. The results show that in the short to medium term donations are not the salvation of the media, but these initiatives can reflect that the final role of the media transcends the business concept, as they gain in quality in terms of proximity to the subject that interests their audience.