Please consider supporting our work!

Every Wikinews accredited reporter works as a volunteer; there are no paid journalists, editors, copy-editors, or reviewers, anywhere on the site. Many will devote days – sometimes weeks – on investigative, truly original, reports.

We're not looking for you to pay their expenses — rather, to support this infrastructure that allows them to carry on reporting. And, to hopefully improve on what is currently available to us.

A cup of coffee?

We don't think that the suggested donation of £1.50 is unreasonable; it's well-below the current level of the Starbucks tall-latté index in most parts of the world.

That's right, the amount we're asking you to donate wouldn't buy you a cup of coffee. In the linked-to 2004 article, the only listed countries where you'd get your tall latté cheaper were Malaysia and Thailand.

What that £1.50 means to us is approximately one week's hosting costs, or one week's email account costs; politicians, public-relations people, scientists, and academics, tend to throw away emails from gmail or hotmail. Having a recognisable, dedicated domain, and the email addresses to go with, it greatly increases the number of responses any queries we send out receive.

What your donations help provide

Over twenty accredited journalists around the world rely on the email facilities, non-public story development, and research documentation storage facilites, here on Wikinewsie.org. Professional-looking email addresses mean we get far, far more responses when approaching people for interviews, asking academics for their advice and interpretation of publications, and — importantly, in terms of acting as the "Fourth Estate" — obtaining information under relevant freedom of information legislation.

The ability to work on some stories out of the public eye permits us to request press releases, reports, and other information which is advance-released under embargo. Wikinewsies given advance-access to press releases, on a par with more mainstream media, can generally carry out far more background research, presenting information in a better context to our readers when any embargo expires and publication is permitted.

If you'd still rather not make a donation, why not join us as part of the new wave of citizen journalism?

Why citizen journalism is more important than ever

Ideally, we would like to move all of the Wikinewsie.org infrastructure — something donations may help us achieve — to a locale which is far more press-friendly. Our current domain registrar and hosting company, Godaddy, have — quite worryingly — put their name on the United States' government's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The scope for misuse within this legislation is truly staggering. The extreme measures which the U.S. Government employed to try and stop all funding for whistleblower site WikiLeaks are included, and made far easier to implement with poor judicial oversight (if any). Anyone who cares about a free press, should find this an unacceptable imposition on the right to free speech.

Consequently, the longer-term goals for the Wikinewsie.org site are as follows:

• Transfer the domain to another registrar who does not support SOPA
• Move all hosting and email operations to a press-friendly locale (possibly Sweden, although Iceland are implementing strong press-protection laws)
• Switch all operations to https: (secure browsing) in-line with the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere initiative

These goals will not need more than your coffee-cup-valued donations; they'll just need a few more people to step up and donate.