Q&A with Ana Marie Cox: Asking the audience to pay for journalism

By Joshua Benton

When the magazine Radar announced it was shutting down last Friday, its Washington editor Ana Marie Cox was left with a seat on John McCain’s plane but no one to pay for it.

(If Cox’s name doesn’t ring an immediate bell, you probably know her as the original Wonkette, or at least as the young woman surrounded by those older gentlemen, on the cover of the Times Magazine four years ago. She has few peers at snarky, blog-sized political commentary, and she’s danced throughout her career between the “legit” journalism world and the blogosphere.)

Cox currently blogs for Time’s Swampland, but that doesn’t pay her travel expenses roaming swing states on the McCain plane. So she decided to see if the Obama fundraising model could work for journalism: Could lots of small-money donors to do the work a few fat-cats used to? Or, as she put it on Twitter early Saturday afternoon:

Within 30 minutes, she had posted a plea for cash to her blog:

Hi. Welcome to my world. A world in which Radar Magazine does not exist. It will cost about $1500 to cover just the last day of the campaign, and over $1000 a day for each day leading up to it. While I still blog for TIME’s “Swampland” — and I will for as long as they let me! — I am without a source for travel funds. So, you know, anyone interested in sponsoring a foul-mouthed blogger, slightly used?

She even listed, NPR-style, what various levels of giving would earn you. Ten bucks earned a thank-you email, fifty a phone call. For $250 or more, she’d ask a senior McCain adviser the question of your choosing and send an MP3 of the response. One grand gets you dinner with Ana after the election.

Within a day, she had about $2,500 raised.

That still leaves her more than $3,000 short of her original plan to be on the trail the last five days of the campaign. So she’s trying new ideas — including selling naming rights to her seat on the plane.

While there’s a slight whiff of absurdity to her pledge drive, this sort of crowdfunded model for journalism is an option a lot of people are looking at seriously. The Knight Foundation has funded Spot.us; bloggers like Chris Allbritton have used targeted reader sponsorships to cover big stories.

I interviewed Ana over email last night while she was Tivoing the “Mad Men” season finale.

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