di Francesco Barbabella

Recently the New York Times published a story by freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw on a plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. What makes Hoshaw’s article special is how it was made: it was the first piece of completely crowdfunded reporting from community-funded journalism site Spot.Us to make the leap to the New York Times, a publication that many consider to be the pinnacle of mainstream American journalism. Cittàteneo interviewed Lindsey to know something more.

Why did you choose to focus your reportage on the Pacific Garbage Patch?
I chose to focus my reporting on the Pacific Garbage Patch because I think this is an environmental problem of a scale we don't normally see and most of the public has never heard about it. I think it's important to cover this issue because most people will never travel to the middle of the ocean and we need reporters that can tell us what's happening out there and why it's relevant. Also, it shocked me. It was horrifying to learn that all this garbage was floating in the ocean. "How could this happen and what can we do?" are the two thoughts that immediately came to mind. I think covering this issue through the news is the first step to answering that question.

Do you know some other cases of successful crowdfunding (that carried to articles published in widespread newspapers like NYT)?
I don't know of any other crowd-funded stories that have made it into the New York Times. My story was the first Spot.us funded story to make it into the Times.

Someone criticized you because of the poor article content (i.e. Megan Garber on CJR). Do you think that the two different media (newspaper and blog) could ever share similar contents or they are destined to remain sources of different information?
I think right now blogs and newspapers are very different. Newspapers are operating on an old model and are under the constraints of institutional control whereas blog have much more freedom. I don't know if this will change down the line because I don't know if newspapers will exist in the future. Certainly for my project, the blog and the newspaper article had different stories to tell. One was a narrative that appeared pretty much in real time and the other was a standard news piece.

Now that your article has been published, do you have any remarks about its content or form? (in other words: do you think you could have done it better?)
If I could have done the article again I would have asked the NYT to provide a link to the blog since it was an integral part of the project. Garber said that I didn't focus enough on the human connection to the patch. Once I got out there I realized that this sort of data--about humans ingesting plastic--wouldn't be available
for months and so I won't be able to write about it as fully as I'd intended. I should have made this point clearer in the article--that the data wasn't readily available.

Which are your next programmes as a free-lance journalist? Do you think to rely again upon crowdfunding to carry on your reporting?
I have some other freelance projects I'm working on right now, but they're still a work in progress so I'm not ready to divulge them just yet. Yes, I would use Spot.us again in the future it was an amazing experience.

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