Public Please

To sustain the citizen journalism movement and end the corporate media’s censorship of public opinion, we need a sound model for public finance. By public finance, I do not mean the largely involuntary and undemocratic form of funding often given the moniker which relies on the goodwill of an elite group of wealthy legislators, or the unrecognized blood-money of billionaire corporate philanthropists, or the secret free-market monies from brand-washed consumers. By public finance, I mean the net sum of voluntary and published micropayments from the piggy banks of all the people.

What we need is a web-based system, a piggy bank press, that allows anyone to pay as little or as much as they want for any piece of content and be held accountable for their patronage, whether that accountability results in praise or blame from those who review the content. We need an open framework that allows everyone to know who financed the content and the details of their editorial requests. Our system must allow anyone to comment on the content and to have their comments freely ranked by the members of the site.

For transparency and accountability, our system must also discriminate between the evaluations of those who pay for the content and those who do not. The readers and producers of the content should know whether the feedback comes from a paying or a non-paying user. And every person should be able to search, browse, and review the entire payment, feedback, and content production histories of every other user. This will help users understand the economic interests at play in the production of citizen journalism.

Similar to what is done with OhmyNews, the piggy bank press should allow anyone to pitch stories and advertise funding for their writing. Moreover, these funds should be held in escrow so they are credible. The histories of these funds, stories that were submitted to them, and their payouts (and non-payouts) should be published. These accounting features will help writers decide whether the funding is reliable and worth the risk of doing the story.

The site should be free of commercial advertisements. If a person or organization wants to advertise, they will have to come up with a fake news article, which will be subject to public review and potential ridicule. If a person sees that an author has a history of corporate reporting that uncritically endorses business products or services, they will be able to comment directly on the article.

In addition, authors of content cannot remove comments to that content. They can make those comments less prominent, but not remove them. However, unlike YouTube, the Piggy Bank should allow users to edit or remove their comments. And it should notify all persons who responded to those comments that its referent has been removed or edited.

For moderation, comments must be evaluated by the members of the site for their appropriateness. Users can flag inappropriate comments and vote on hiding the comment. But again, hidden comments are not deleted. Only comment authors can delete comments. To cut down on spam, all posts will use a CAPTCHA program.

The users of the site will democratically manage the site. A trust fund will be set up to pay for the site’s web hosting, to which the users can contribute. At anytime, registered users who have payed for content can propose an administrative election. If a quorum is reached, every registered user who has paid for content can nominate themselves to be a site administrator. For at least a week, users can discuss the various site admin nominees on the site, casting and editing their votes. At the end of the week, the nominee with the most votes will become the new site admin. Both the new site admin and the trust fund lawyer will receive an email with the new admin password. The site admin will be legally prevented from changing any features to the site without those features being voted on by the paying site members. The site admin will receive a small percentage of the payments made from the site.

Which existing websites come closest to the piggy bank press?