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Our Mission Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Informed & Engaged Communities.

Matter will be a lean, distributed journalism organisation that only produces long, deep pieces of journalism - ideally once a week. The age of journalism businesses doing all forms of journalism are done. They ran the business ideas past some people "who knew what they were doing". They recommended testing and experimentation. They got some feedback on potential Kindle sales. So how do they get started? They needed money. Bobbie's Guardian redundancy money was long spent. They both have babies on the way. The roadblock to getting investors on-board was the need for proof of the concept. And so they decided to try out Kickstarter, the US crowd-sourcing services. They aimed for $50k to commission three big pieces. The most ever raised  on Kickstarter for journalism was $55k. They wanted to be "number two by a little". They called in favours from friends to get their video done, e-mailed everyone they knew. They hit the thousands of dollars out of the gate. Overnight they hit $25,000, and hit their goal in 38 hours. Kickstarter gives you a month to hit the funding target... By the end of the month they had $140,000 - making it the most successful publishing project on Kickstarter.