About Us

Hi everyone, sharing here the About Us page I designed for Pactio. It's pretty straightforward and the goal was not only to show the brand and what Pactio is about, but also more insights about the CEO and CCO of the company, adding some context about their experience and previous works; references to the supporters, that helped Pactio and some FAQ that can answer some of your questions that you may have in mind.

Checkout the live page

What Pactio is about

Pactio, Latin for “pact”, is a curated platform where people can better connect with and directly fund the work of vetted journalists around a shared, almost contractual idea of a pact. The pact works like this: to support in-depth reporting on one issue, members pay a low monthly fee that unlocks a front seat to a reporter’s journalistic journey, gives them commenting and posting rights (to the community page) and makes them feel they’re helping offer to the world something that should exist, as Jay Rosen and Emily Goligoski’s Membership Puzzle Project explains.

We want journalists to share their thought process, be open about the backstory of what they cover, curate pearls they find and, yes, collaborate with their audience. We believe that exercise is not only needed; it’s also a way to make them money.

Good news is, you only need a couple thousand paid members to make a living. So what we’re doing at Pactio is lower the bar for financial viability of high-level reporting.

Now, there have been several crowdfunding journalism projects in the past and none of them are around anymore despite some incredibly pioneering work that has been done. Why should Pactio succeed?

First, we focus on ongoing financial support rather than one-off donations. Support is part of a membership model whose cornerstone is the pact between a journalist and her audience.

Second, Pactio is centered around individual journalists (be they independent or employed) rather than news organizations, which will streamline trust.

Last but not least, timing is everything. After Brexit and the 2016 US election, there’s a growing sentiment in the overall population that journalism is the best insurance policy a democracy can ever hope for. Just look at a recent Knight Foundation/Gallup study.

But that growth is not sustainable unless we rethink the way news is created and funded around the idea of a more intimate and direct relationship between journalists and their audience.

That’s what we are building with the awesome team at Pactio. We are lucky to be based at the JSK Journalism Fellowships at Stanford which is an epicenter for journalism innovation. I’m also excited to announce today that I’ve been named an Lenfest Entrepreneur at the Lenfest Institute, which fosters innovation in local journalism, a big priority for Pactio.