Crowdfunding Project To Fund Reporting About Women

Crowdfunding has birthed all kinds of worthy projects.  Here's one that will be of interest to readers here, from Sabine Muscat, freelance journalist based in Washington:

"I wanted to share the news about a crowd funding project that I am involved in. It is based in Germany - and while only some of you read German, I still think that you might be interested to hear about our project.

"The name of the project is "Deine Korrespondentin" (Your correspondent - using the female form of the word in German) - and we are seven women who are trying to set up a website for long-form reporting. We are based in Africa, Asia, Afghanistan, Russia, Germany, and (in my case) in the U.S. - and we want to write about women - from a female perspective. If we can raise the first 5,000 Euros we need in the first stage, the first story is going to be about East Africa's first female fighter pilot. The aim is to eventually have paid subscribers.

"Here is the link to the campaign: https://www.startnext.com/deine-korrespondentin

"Our goal is to report the stories that are only accessible for female reporters (accessibility in terms of life experience, but sometimes in the literal sense, e.g. in countries like Afghanistan where only a female reporter has access to women). The other goal is to be able to tell the stories that are sometimes turned down by male dominated news desks.

"My personal example is that a colleague and I had to fight an entire year to be able to write a story for a business magazine about the global fertility market (with examples from Europe and the U.S.). My editors turned it down several times (Why should we write about all the things people do to get children? Because it is a huge market!) until Facebook offered  their female employees to freeze their eggs - that's when my editors realized that fertility is a topic for a business publication.

"The founder of the project is Pauline Tillmann, a young (compared to me at least!) freelance journalist based in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is her own multimedia business who experiments with audio, blogging and video. http://www.pauline-tillmann.de/life/curriculum-vitae-cv/?lang=en

"I met her when she stayed with me in DC last summer when she was in the U.S. for a project to report about new trends in journalism. She came to stay with me through another crowd funded project, https://hostwriter.org

"Hostwriter is an initiative through which international journalists can help each other with their research or provide a sofa to crash on for colleagues traveling on a limited budget (as most of us do these days).

"Just thought you might find all of this interesting. And for those of you who do read German - please check out our campaign!"

And check out it out even if you don't read German.  Also, don't miss Sabine's blog (in English)  here.