spot-us / spot-us

Community Funded Reporting

Spot.Us

Community Funded Reporting

“Spot Us” is a project of the nonprofit Center for Media Change that allows an individual or group to take control of news by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists. Spot.Us is made possible by the Knight Foundation. Read more.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you any questions or comments.

How does Spot.Us work?

1. An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.
2. Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.
3. A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.
4. Spot.Us publishes the story in its news feeds and works with local media outlets to have the articles published more widely.

http://www.spot.us/

Setting Up Spot.Us

Setup configuration files

Make any necessary edits to these if the defaults don’t work for you. Spot.Us is dependent on MySQL because it uses the rand() function.

1. cp config/database.example.yml config/database.yml
2. cp config/newrelic.example.yml config/newrelic.yml
3. cp config/settings.example.yml config/settings.yml

Run basic setup tasks

1. rake db:create:all
2. rake db:migrate
3. rake db:populate

Start your local server

1. ./script/server

Spot.Us should now be running on your computer at the URL http://spotus.local:3000