Stock photo courtesy of pixabay.com user Hans.

Gathering money directly from would-be audience members is not a particularly successful method of funding journalistic investigations, claim Ralf Spiller, Andreas Köhler, both of Macromedia University of Applied Sciences and Matthias Degen, of Westfalian University of Applied Sciences (names not in original order). They came to the conclusion through a collection of international case studies and interviews.

These findings were first presented in the European Communication Conference in Lisbon last month. Summary of the presentation is available online via European Journalism Observatory, here.