The Freelance Reporting Initiative commissions reporters to write freelance stories highlighting the challenges posed to the journalism industry by the tech giants in two categories. First, the impact of Google and Facebook’s dominance of the digital advertising marketplace and what it means for the future of the news business. And second, the crisis facing local news and ethnic media due to the destruction of its business model and what that means for affected communities.

Freelance reporting has long been a critical part of the American journalistic landscape, with greats like Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson defining the genre for generations of reporters. But like everything else in journalism these days, freelance reporting doesn’t pay what it once did. While it was common for Hemingway to get up to $5 a word for a story and most freelancers getting around $2, today publications can pay as little as 25 cents. Our Freelance Reporting Initiative will pay freelancers $2 a word, far more than the going rate and reflective of the need to support high-quality journalism. Our goal with this initiative is to raise $10,000 to enable us to commission five stories of 1,000 words each.