As if switching up to Movable Type wasn’t enough, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall now has a modest proposal up on his site:
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to going to New Hampshire in January to cover the primary – probably for the last ten days or so before the actual vote on January 27th…
Now, the normal way to do this would be for me to go to one of the publications I write for, get them to pick up the tab (hotel room, transportation, etc.), and write it up for them.
But that would mean saving most of the reporting for some magazine or website or newspaper and not doing much or any of it for TPM. And, frankly, I think blog coverage is much better suited to covering something like the New Hampshire primary than magazines or newspapers…
I want to dedicate this trip entirely to blog coverage so I want to fund it with reader support, reader subscriptions.
Marshall is one of the top blogging journalists out there, and I’ve been wondering if he was going to take an Andrew Sullivan-like leap into funding his work through his readers, rather than subsidizing himself with more traditional print-media gigs. I kicked in a few bucks (sadly, all my grad student budget will allow), and I’m curious to see where this experiment will go.
UPDATE: Within 24 hours, Marhall’s already got more than enough cash. To be precise, he raised $4864 within less than 24 hours. You can count this as another example of the power of distributed small-scale fundraising…
