YouComm News
YouComm News was an Australian non-profit that connected journalists, publishers, and the public to crowdsource ideas, funding, and other resources for community journalism. It began in 2010, founded by freelance journalist Melissa Sweet and Margaret Simons of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, and was based at Swinburne University in Melbourne. Its model mirrored the Spot.us system in the United States. Members of the public could suggest story ideas or donate money to pitches; journalists could propose ideas or work on existing ones; publishers could fund stories or buy completed pieces, with donors reimbursed. The project launched with a story examining the suspension of a childhood immunisation program following several cases of febrile convulsions in Australian children. By 2020, the Public Interest Journalism Foundation had become an independent group called Public Interest Journalistic Freedom, funded in part by crowd-sourcing.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 01:30 (CET).