Keep Grasswire Open
Donation protected
Can you help us Keep Grasswire Open?
At first glance, Grasswire is a news website like any other. But it’s not. It’s much more than that.
We’re a community of over 1,100 people from all over the world who care about honest, accurate news. We source, verify, write and edit unbiased news stories that matter.
And we do it in our spare time.
And it’s not just for us – hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world read the news on our website every month. They trust us to deliver.
But we have a problem.
If we don’t raise $1,200 per month by March 1, our website will close down for good. We don’t want that to happen.
We need your support to keep Grasswire open.
But, what exactly is Grasswire?
We’re a 1,100-strong global community of people who care about accurate news. Most of us aren’t journalists or writers or editors. Few of us have ever met in person.
We all want accurate, factual and fast-moving coverage of current world events. So we do it ourselves.
We collaborate online in an open Slack channel where we pitch, source, verify, write and edit newsworthy, interesting and unbiased stories. See the channel in action for yourself here.
These stories are published on our website, a specially designed piece of software that allows anyone to write, publish and edit news. See it here.
What stories have you covered?
The latest version of the website was launched in September, and since then we’ve written more than 1,100 stories.
We covered corruption protests in Moldova, the on-going refugee crisis, the discovery of water on Mars, the Paris attacks and their aftermath, the war in Syria, the San Bernardino shootings and many, many more.
One of our fact-checks was picked up by other news outlets and was widely cited as an example of good crowdsourced news verification.
We even helped write the handbook on how to cover terrorism-related breaking news.
Our review of 2015, published in December, highlighted some of our contributors’ favorite stories.
We want to keep writing and publishing the stories that matter.
So, why does Grasswire need money?
Grasswire was born as the dream of two co-founders, Austen Allred and Levi Notik.
They formed a company to create this space we work in. They raised the funds and wrote the software. They employed staff to build on the dream.
But in December Grasswire hit a speed bump.
Austen explained in an open letter:
“We were hoping to close a funding round with a new investment partner which would have allowed us to grow the team and further develop the technology, but it fell through at the last minute. Our existing investors are willing to invest again, but we didn’t feel that this investment opportunity would put us in the best position to scale the company.
“As a result, we are trying to find a new home where Grasswire can continue to grow. We want to make it clear to Grasswire users that, whatever happens, we’ll do everything we can to make sure Grasswire stays around indefinitely.”
What does this mean?
Since January 1, Grasswire has been entirely volunteer-driven. We have no financial backing, and we have no paid employees.
More than 100,000 people from all over the world visit our website every month, and it costs money to keep the website online for them.
We need to pay for the servers that host the website, to pay the monthly bill for bandwidth, computing time and storage.
It costs about $1,200 per month just to keep the website online.
We need your support to keep Grasswire open.
What’s in Grasswire’s future?
We’ll keep reporting the news.
We’ll keep highlighting the tiny stories that no-one else does. We’ll keep covering meaningful news from all over the world, from places you’ve never heard of to the story that could have happened just a few blocks over.
We’ll give you the news that matters.
We’ll keep expanding our newsroom, and enabling more people to take part in what we think is so important.
But we also want to make the website software open for everybody so that software developers all over the world can contribute. The strength the website gains from this collaboration will be massive, just like in our newsroom.
Together we can continue building a truly open and inclusive platform for news.
Can you help us Keep Grasswire Open?
At first glance, Grasswire is a news website like any other. But it’s not. It’s much more than that.
We’re a community of over 1,100 people from all over the world who care about honest, accurate news. We source, verify, write and edit unbiased news stories that matter.
And we do it in our spare time.
And it’s not just for us – hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world read the news on our website every month. They trust us to deliver.
But we have a problem.
If we don’t raise $1,200 per month by March 1, our website will close down for good. We don’t want that to happen.
We need your support to keep Grasswire open.
But, what exactly is Grasswire?
We’re a 1,100-strong global community of people who care about accurate news. Most of us aren’t journalists or writers or editors. Few of us have ever met in person.
We all want accurate, factual and fast-moving coverage of current world events. So we do it ourselves.
We collaborate online in an open Slack channel where we pitch, source, verify, write and edit newsworthy, interesting and unbiased stories. See the channel in action for yourself here.
These stories are published on our website, a specially designed piece of software that allows anyone to write, publish and edit news. See it here.
What stories have you covered?
The latest version of the website was launched in September, and since then we’ve written more than 1,100 stories.
We covered corruption protests in Moldova, the on-going refugee crisis, the discovery of water on Mars, the Paris attacks and their aftermath, the war in Syria, the San Bernardino shootings and many, many more.
One of our fact-checks was picked up by other news outlets and was widely cited as an example of good crowdsourced news verification.
We even helped write the handbook on how to cover terrorism-related breaking news.
Our review of 2015, published in December, highlighted some of our contributors’ favorite stories.
We want to keep writing and publishing the stories that matter.
So, why does Grasswire need money?
Grasswire was born as the dream of two co-founders, Austen Allred and Levi Notik.
They formed a company to create this space we work in. They raised the funds and wrote the software. They employed staff to build on the dream.
But in December Grasswire hit a speed bump.
Austen explained in an open letter:
“We were hoping to close a funding round with a new investment partner which would have allowed us to grow the team and further develop the technology, but it fell through at the last minute. Our existing investors are willing to invest again, but we didn’t feel that this investment opportunity would put us in the best position to scale the company.
“As a result, we are trying to find a new home where Grasswire can continue to grow. We want to make it clear to Grasswire users that, whatever happens, we’ll do everything we can to make sure Grasswire stays around indefinitely.”
What does this mean?
Since January 1, Grasswire has been entirely volunteer-driven. We have no financial backing, and we have no paid employees.
More than 100,000 people from all over the world visit our website every month, and it costs money to keep the website online for them.
We need to pay for the servers that host the website, to pay the monthly bill for bandwidth, computing time and storage.
It costs about $1,200 per month just to keep the website online.
We need your support to keep Grasswire open.
What’s in Grasswire’s future?
We’ll keep reporting the news.
We’ll keep highlighting the tiny stories that no-one else does. We’ll keep covering meaningful news from all over the world, from places you’ve never heard of to the story that could have happened just a few blocks over.
We’ll give you the news that matters.
We’ll keep expanding our newsroom, and enabling more people to take part in what we think is so important.
But we also want to make the website software open for everybody so that software developers all over the world can contribute. The strength the website gains from this collaboration will be massive, just like in our newsroom.
Together we can continue building a truly open and inclusive platform for news.
Can you help us Keep Grasswire Open?
Organizer
Grasswire Newsroom
Organizer
Oakton, VA