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Arkansas Times’ Crowdfunded Partnership A Go in Mayflower

2 min read

Looks like Arkansas Times is heading to Mayflower.

Outtakes previously reported on the crowd funding collaboration between Little Rock’s Arkansas Times and Pulitzer-winning InsideClimate News of Brooklyn, by which the publications were seeking about $25,000 to fund a definitive report on the ExxonMobil spill in Mayflower.

The project reached its goal, scoring $26,790, in less than a month.

Times Editor Lindsey Millar said the crowd funding platform, IOBY.org, takes a cut of about 5 percent of the total for its handling fee.

He also said the paper received an additional $8,000 from the nonprofit Fund for Investigative Journalism, which the Times applied for before starting the IOBY campaign. Millar noted that the fund was aware of the successful IOBY campaign when it offered the additional money. The fund’s award means a bigger project, Millar said.

“We were sort of anticipating several phases,” he said. “Now we are really confident we can extend this out and be ambitious.”

Millar said the two reporters, Sam Eifling, a regular contributor to the Arkansas Times and Elizabeth McGowan of InsideClimate, will choose different angles of the story to chase, and the results will run in both publications.

The two reporters will be delivering multiple stories on the beat, and Millar said the amount of time to be spent on the project isn’t yet known.

“We’re planning on doing a range of stories,” he said. “We’ll do some online, initially — shorter pieces of reportage and some longer stories that will probably also appear online first. We’ll also have a cover story or two with a mix of what’s appeared online and probably some fresh reporting.”

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