Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Gawker is about $80,000 into a cheeky scheme to raise a couple hundred grand to pay some drug dealers for a video that allegedly shows Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. The “Crackstarter” campaign has caught some flak on ethical grounds – some people are uncomfortable with the idea of a news organization paying drug dealers for anything – but put those concerns aside and you can see that Gawker’s experiment presents a pretty useful case study for the idea of crowdfunding journalism....