Good news for freelancers: Public Insight Network is acquiring Spot.us

By Lauren Rabaino

If you’re a freelancer and you haven’t heard of Spot.us yet, you’ve been missing out. (Full disclosure: I worked as a contract designer for Spot.us from Dec. 2009 – Jan 2011). Spot.us is a crowd-funded reporting platform that allows reporters and organizations to submit story ideas, set a funding goal, and raise money from the public toward that goal.

But this week, the possibilities for Spot.us just got a lot more interesting: They were acquired by the Public Insight Network. As part of American Public Media, PIN is a platform that gives journalists access to a repository of knowledgeable sources to help make their reporting stronger.

So the merger means that freelancers who pitch stories will have both the means of raising money, plus the access to people who can give quality information about those stories. Read more about it here.