Crowd-funded journalism is a novel business model in which journalists rely on micropayments from ordinary people to finance their reporting. Based on analyses of the database of Spot.us, a pioneering crowd-funded journalism website, we examine the impact of crowd-funded journalism on the news produced. We apply a uses and gratifications approach to study consumers' choices when they donate to crowd-funded journalism and find that consumers are more likely to donate to stories that provide them with practical guidance for daily living e.g., stories about public health or local city infrastructure, as opposed to stories from which they gain a general awareness of the world e.g., cultural diversity, or government and politics. We discuss the implications for the future of news.
Using an experiment and probability sample of Chicago and Los Angeles adults (N = 1211), this study tested how tweet characteristics (tone, space) and participant age (younger, middle, older) affected attitudes about tweets from a local newspaper. Results indicate that non-opinionated tweets were perceived as more useful and credible than opinionated tweets, and local tweets resulted in more engagement than national tweets. Younger participants (19–36 years) reported more positive affect, usefulness, engagement, and credibility related to tweets than did middle/older age groups. Younger participants were generally more negative about opinionated national tweets and preferred opinionated local tweets compared with middle/older groups.
Perfect Quantum Cloning Machines (QCM) would allow to use quantum nonlocality for arbitrary fast signaling. However perfect QCM cannot exist. We derive a bound on the fidelity of QCM compatible with the no-signaling constraint. This bound equals the fidelity of the Bu\v{z}ek-Hillery QCM.