One of the problems with the subscription model in journalism is that news consumers who choose to subscribe to an outlet — or outlets, depending on their budget — know full well that their choice is not the only outlet from which they will be getting their news.

Let’s say I can only afford to pay around $5 a month for a subscription and the New York Times happens to be one of my favorite news sources. Hmm, perfect! I can get a basic digital NYT subscription for $1 a week — with the student discount.

Although I would feel good about supporting at least one news organization, I know I would be getting a lot of my news, or maybe most of it, from other sources, including two or three news outlets in New Jersey, several magazines and national newspapers and a whole variety of outlets I may find on Twitter or elsewhere.

What if there was a system for me to distribute my $5 through multiple news organizations?

Well, that is exactly what Brazil’s chapter of Open Knowledge International is trying to do with Libre, a technology created to facilitate small financial contributions to digital news outlets. And it allows consumers to do so by the click of a button, essentially “liking” different news stories or organizations as they see fit.  The microfinancing technology, which is in beta testing, also aims to foster a closer relationship between individual journalists and their audience.

The donation button appears on editorial pages of participating news sites and invites readers to click, just like the social media buttons invite readers to share the content. To donate, readers must register on Libre’s website and choose a monthly plan, which ranges from about R$20 to R$500 (about $6 to $157), according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Subscribers then allocate their money in “Libres,” or LBR, the platform’s digital currency (not to be confused with cryptocurrency; this is not on a blockchain). Each Libre is worth R$1 (about $0.31). If readers don’t distribute all of their monthly finds, the balance is split evenly among the organizations or writers that they “liked.”

“We believe that Libre offers a particularly simple and direct solution to sample the audience and the relevance they attribute to content. It’s an intuitive, familiar kind of interface in this timeline environment and post-to-post information consumption,” the platform founders told the Knight Center in a statement in September.

The group includes Bruno Torturra, of journalism studio Fluxo, Thiago Rondon from AppCivico and Ariel Kogan of Open Knowledge Brasil.

The outlets currently testing Libre on their websites are all fairly new. They include Aos Fatos, a fact-checking agency; Gastrolândia, a gastronomy news site; and Gênero e Número, a data-driven news magazine focused on gender equality stories.

The beauty of this system, in my opinion, is that it puts power in the hands of the subscriber, allowing them to support journalism from organizations they might otherwise never do if they’re only able to subscribe to one outlet at a time. Even if it seems like a very small donation, or a tip, the more people who subscribe and start using the tool, the more support participating news outlets will have.

In addition, this mechanism would hopefully encourage and help finance quality journalism, assuming that Libre subscribers would donate to journalists and organizations that produce important and high-quality content, not those dedicated to click-bait posts, for instance.

It is also a crucial time to support independent journalism in Brazil, where the press is going through a serious financial and credibility crisis. But at the same time, as Libre states on its website, there have never been as many media outlets and initiatives exploring the possibilities of network journalism.

I learned about Libre after reading about Festival 3i, an event featuring innovative, inspiring and independent journalism initiatives that took place in Rio de Janeiro this month. The festival and all the ideas that were presented are absolutely encouraging and I hope to write about some of those other initiatives in the days and weeks to come. And I’ll definitely keep an idea on Libre, which I really hope goes mainstream.

Jonah Peretti’s path to leading one of the biggest digital media companies of our time, known as BuzzFeed, was all but ordinary.

He’s not a journalist, but his company has broken many huge news stories in recent years. He’s not a businessman, but he owns an extremely successful organization. He’s not a psychologist, but he seems to understand people’s online behavior better than most of his peers in the industry.

Peretti, a 43-year-old entrepreneur from California, has some really interesting attributes that make him, in my opinion, one of the most admirable media innovators of our time. He’s curious, he likes change and he’s not afraid to experiment or push the boundaries.

A little background on him will help you understand what I mean: Peretti has a degree in environmental sciences from the University of California. After he graduated in 1996, he taught computer science at a New Orleans high school and later left that job to study at the MIT Media Lab.

While at MIT in early 2001, he became known for an email exchange with Nike, which went viral after he forwarded it to a few friends, who forwarded it to some of their friends and so on. The emails showed his unsuccessful attempts to order a pair of Nike shoes with the word “sweatshop” printed on them. The viral messages landed him an interview on the Today Show. It was a turning point in his career, one that led to several other experimental projects he developed to test what would go viral.

He was told by several people he could not replicate the success of the viral Nike emails, but he was determined to try it again and he succeeded. With each project, the timeline to spread got shorter, from months to weeks to days.

It became clear at that point that Peretti was obsessed with a question many in the media failed to ask for years and years. He wanted to find out what it meant that the audience became the distribution system and how the media should handle that change.

In a July interview with Guy Raz for NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast, Peretti said he wanted to figure out why people shared things, what value they got from doing so, what kind of content caught their attention and — the million-dollar question — what would happen to the media and entertainment industry if the distribution of content was dictated by users sharing things with each other.

“The audience became the network,” he told Raz. “I felt like that was a big shift… What does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it?”

Peretti was asking the right questions at the right time.

In 2005, he co-founded The Huffington Post, where he tried to figure out how to make the publication popular on the internet. We surely know how well that went. In a 2014 interview on Medium, he described his HuffPost work as a constant evolution amid ever-changing business strategies.

“HuffPost, like any other company, had to keep reinventing itself, and changing its model, and evolving, and building technology, and moving from linking out to other sites on the web to making more content,” Peretti said in the Medium interview.

In 2006, as more and more people were trying to create viral content online, Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project — a lab where he could experiment with and track viral online content. Five years later, he joined BuzzFeed full-time after AOL bought the HuffPost. BuzzFeed — which started as a collection of listicles, memes and cat videos — has since turned into a media giant and it’s now worth at least $1.7 billion.

Peretti’s early understanding that the audience was changing the media industry was crucial to his success. But his vision wouldn’t be enough without a lot of hard work, curiosity and his willingness to experiment, take risks and constantly adapt.

“I like to be working in sectors where there’s no clear model to find yet, where things like social and mobile and online video or things that are still evolving so quickly that there’s not a clear, stable business there yet. I like to be in the kind of places where things are being formed,” Peretti told Medium. 

To listen to Peretti’s interview on “How I Built This,” click here:

If I were to launch a startup, I have no doubt that my biggest challenge would be money. That may be the case for most people, but I’ve never been great at managing my own finances, so exploring all different funding sources will undoubtedly take me a lot of my time.

With that in mind, there are a few things I have to seriously consider including in my Studio 20’s startup feasibility report. But let me first step back and update you on my latest (and hopefully final) startup idea.

I have decided not to pursue the tech news app idea that I briefly considered earlier this semester. My plan now is to launch a data journalism team, The Data Squad, who will produce data-driven news stories for short-staffed local newsrooms in undercovered parts of the country.

The team would create stories from start to finish: collecting, compiling, cleaning and analyzing data; producing articles, videos, charts, audio, infographics, interactive features or any other form that would work well with a story; and create a distribution plan so that the story is widely shared and to maximize impact. Many of the skills required for that work are missing in struggling newsrooms around the country, so Squad would provide a much-needed resource for those communities. Our clients would be the local newsrooms, which would pay us for the whole story package.

Before going into details about the Squad’s operations, let’s get straight to the cash problem. Here are five things I’m considering to manage my budget in the first year of business:

1. Office space? Um, no.
   News organizations like NJ Spotlight and Patch, which have been around for years, do not have office spaces. So why should a new startup that doesn’t need large hardware or a studio have an office right away? At least for the first year, I think our team can work from home, coffee shops, libraries and co-working spaces, for instance. That means we won’t have to pay for rent, electricity, water, wifi and other utilities. Another reason not to have a physical space is that this startup would be traveling to produce stories outside of New York.
2. Find a co-founder
   Two brains are better than one, the old saying goes. Having no experience in launching a business and little experience in fancy data visualization software, I would greatly benefit from working with at least one partner. I also wouldn’t quit my day job right away — not for the first six months, at least — so two people working part-time is better than one person working part-time.
3. Start small
   As I mentioned above, the Data Squad would start as a very small organization. During the first six months, I would hope to spend at least 20 hours on it every week, but probably no more than 30. In addition, I don’t believe I would invest in advertising at all during in the beginning. The goal for the first few months is to build a brand, by refining business model, producing work that will serve as featured examples on our website and creating connections with key journalists around the country who may start spreading the word about our work. As for hirings, I believe two highly-skilled full-time data journalists would be enough to start. If additional manpower is needed, we could seek freelancers.
4. Equipment and software
   There are some basic computer programs and equipment that our team would need to produce dig through data and produce cutting-edge visual stories. Although I would refrain from making a big investment in the beginning, I believe we would definitely need: at least two work laptops with Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Office, Tabula, Chartbuilder, Datawrapper, Inkscape and others; and at least one audio recorder and two DSLR cameras with microphones, tripods and other necessary parts.
5. Kickstarter
   Given that this startup would ideally help inform and strengthen undercovered communities across the country, I believe the project has a great chance of drawing financial support through a Kickstarter campaign. A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that interest in crowdfunding journalism is growing and many journalism crowdfunding campaigns take place on Kickstarter. The report found that more than 170 journalism projects were funded on Kickstarter in 2015, up from 17 in 2009. The amount of money given to those projects also grew: from less than $50,000 in 2009 to more than $1.7 million in 2015.
6. The L-word
   This is the most unpleasant part, but it’s probably inevitable. In order to pay for a team of data journalists to get this work done, even if it’s a two- or three-person team, I have to consider taking out a loan — even typing the word bothers me. I don’t like loans because I currently owe a lot in student loans and it’s crazy how high the interest rates are. However, if Kickstarter is not enough I would consider reaching out to banks and try to find the lowest interest rates available in the market.

So what would those numbers be? How much do I need to launch The Data Squad? Honestly, I don’t know. But I think it would be somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000 for the first six months. (Is that crazy? Or crazy low?)

Anyway, I calculated about $8,000 for equipment and software for the two full-time data journalists. Their annual salaries would range from a low of $45,000 (I don’t think I would get anyone qualified for less than that) and $65,000, depending on experience. I would also like to have a budget for freelancers — about $10,000 for those first six months — and another $10,000 in a bank account for travel expenses and unplanned expenses. My partner and I would have no salary until the business is profitable and we would handle the website ourselves.

These numbers will most likely change until my feasibility report is done in a few weeks, but that’s where things stand right now. I have a lot to learn when it comes to starting a business and money, as I said, will be the main obstacle.