Literary Travel Magazine Wields the Power of Crowdfunding to Offer Writers a Respectable Paycheck

“There’s been a lot of assumption by people in our industry that people don't want to pay for stories, that they don’t want to pay for content that they can get for free elsewhere,” says Hidden Compass co-founder and co-CEO Sabine K. Bergmann. “But what if there was more than just text? What if readers could connect to human beings, to the storytellers themselves? What if they could see their faces and hear their voices and be able to contribute to them directly?”

In Autumn 2021, editors at the digital travel magazine Hidden Compass published journalist Lauren Napier’s essay “Lines of Duty” about Camp Naco in Arizona, a barracks that housed Black soldiers during the Mexican Revolution. Click on the link to her story, and you’ll see dynamic photos of the camp’s abandoned buildings crumbling in a sagebrush-strewn field, along with a century-old photo of Major Charles Young, and a photo of Napier in a long dress and boots picking her way through camp ruins. By the time you read the piece and study all the photos, you’re personally invested in her work.

It helps that the webpage includes all of Napier’s social media links and a video in which she explains the process of researching and writing her essay. When you see this invitation, right up next to the headline: “Support the journalist pushing past barriers to champion forgotten legacies”–accompanied by a link to a $1500 crowdfunding campaign—it’s just about impossible not to contribute something to a storyteller who’s brought a little-known historical setting to life.

Editors paid Napier a flat fee of $400 for her essay; she also receives half of the money earned by the campaign. The other half goes back into the magazine. “There’s been a lot of assumption by people in our industry that people don’t want to pay for stories, that they don’t want to pay for content that they can get for free elsewhere,” says Hidden Compass co-founder and co-CEO Sabine K. Bergmann. “But what if there was more than just text? What if readers could connect to human beings, to the storytellers themselves? What if they could see their faces and hear their voices and be able to contribute to them directly?”

These are the questions that have informed the magazine’s business model since its inception in 2017. Bergmann, along with co-founder and co-CEO Sivani Babu, resolved to pay journalists a flat fee for their work, and then to feature them over a 90-day fundraising campaign, the proceeds of which they split 50-50 with the writer. “People want to support journalists, they want to support storytellers,” Bergmann says. “If they can see them and feel like they have a way to support them, they will.”

She and Babu have long, colorful histories as storytellers. Bergmann, who has a B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford, moved to Bolivia when she was 19. She served in the Peace Corps, and she’s worked as a journalist around the world. Babu graduated from the University of Chicago with degrees in Economics, Public Policy Studies, and Political Science, and went on to get a law degree from the University of Pennysylvania. She’s worked as a Math teacher for Teach for America, as a public defender, and now travel photographer and journalist.

The first few years after they founded Hidden Compass, Bergmann and Babu were still working as freelance journalists to support themselves. They didn’t take a salary, and did all the company work themselves—including website building and story editing.

“Our original flat fees were actually a bit lower and the stories were much shorter,” Bergmann explains. “We paid $200-300 a story in the beginning, and earned modest income from workshops that eventually became international and profitable enough to cover the magazine. But we knew that model couldn’t grow the way we wanted it to.”

Once they decided to pivot to a new business model and offer a personal connection to storytellers, they were able to secure angel investment and hire talented individuals. Thanks in large part to the writing community they were part of in the Bay Area, the audience for Hidden Compass grew 50% annually. “I guess you could say this network was the basis for change, but they were only the beginning,” Bergmann says. “Really, we’re one of the only companies that offer a personal connection to storytellers and we were right that that’s something a lot of people are looking for.”

Readers who watch Lauren Napier’s video about her essay writing process learn that when she first visited Camp Naco and saw the weathered signs and decaying barracks, she felt both sad and intrigued. “The story’s important because I think we need all the pieces of the truth, and the Buffalo Soldiers certainly factor into the concept of westward expansion of this American Dream,” she says on the video.

Napier is often hesitant about crowdfunding campaigns. “As both a journalist and a musician, I tend to steer clear of such thing. It’s asking a lot of your audience,” she notes. “But the way that Hidden Compass does such things seems to be a bit gentler, and it stems from a desire to individually spotlight and support the beings that contributed to the latest issue.”

Babu and Bergmann know of no other publication that showcases writers with photography, videography, and an individual fundraising campaign such as the one they’ve launched for Napier. Often, staff at literary magazines find themselves unable to pay contributors, or—with scant income—they can offer only a token amount to show appreciation for the work. “They’re often reliant on donors, grants, and university funding sources. Their ability to compensate writers is kind of hamstringed,” Bergmann explains. “A lot of these publications have shrinking budgets and what they’re able to offer writers per story or word has been declining.”

She and Babu note that many magazines continue to rely on a combination of advertisements and subscriptions in order to survive. “In the internet age, that also includes the advertisements are reliant on clicks,” Babu explains. “That’s driven the industry toward clickbait and toward content that can generate those clicks, and also toward collecting and selling user data. While we understand the predicament that literary publications and other publications are in, we think feeding into it, rather than trying to change it, is part of the problem.”

Babu and Bergmann were able to work toward their unique vision because they started small and weren’t constrained by some of the challenges that befall larger publications. “When we started the company, we funded everything by teaching workshops,” Babu explains. “But that wasn’t sustainable as we grew. It wasn’t going to get us to where we want it to go.”

They studied the evolution of other industries that have reconfigured in the digital age and found particular inspiration in the farm-to-table movement which advocates buying food directly from local producers whom consumers get to know personally. (Think farmer’s markets, CSA newsletters penned by regional growers, and Meet the Farmer days.) I know I’m more likely to shell out a few extra dollars for a jar of local honey if I get to meet the beekeeper instrumental in producing it; the same appears to hold true for stories that are accompanied by intimate photo and video insights into the creative process . . . and into the creators, themselves.

“For centuries, food was by necessity local. It was sustainable, and it was, by and large, healthy,” Babu explains. “And then you saw the industrialization of food beginning in the 1950s, and it became about cheap, unhealthy, mass-produced food. It became about TV dinners and things that could have a shelf life for far too long.” Likewise, journalism—especially in response to the 24-hour news cycle—became all about information that could be consumed quickly and cheaply. Journalists as real people, and not just as a means to this information, all but disappeared from public consciousness.

Babu believes the pendulum has swung back, that people want to engage with their food and get a better understanding of where it’s from and who’s growing it. “People understand that what we put in our bodies affects the way we live our lives,” Babu notes. “And just as people started to think about the quality of what we put in our bodies, they’re now thinking about the quality of what they’re putting in their minds.”

She, along with Bergmann, describes the internet as representative of the industrialization of media. “It’s become about what can be cheaply mass-produced, and it’s become unhealthy in lot of ways,” Babu explains. “We saw that perhaps media was poised for the same shift that food has seen. People want to be part of something bigger, and not just viewed as the means to a transaction.”

Combine this trend with a public interest in crowdfunding, and the time seemed right to launch a fundraising model which showcases individual journalists and their stories. As writers themselves, Babu and Bergmann understand that what they’re asking of contributors is somewhat out of the ordinary. “We’re used to writing a story and it goes out there and we hide behind a byline,” Babu says. “This is not what happens at Hidden Compass.”

Lauren Napier is a case in point. Click on a link with an invitation to meet the journalist, and you’ll see large photos of her along with plenty of biographical information, plus links to her previous stories in other publications, and her short explanatory video on YouTube. As well, you’ll see how close the magazine is to reaching her $1,500 goal.

“Our writers have very much stepped up to this fundraising challenge,” Babu says. “They’re excited about being able to share more about themselves and to introduce people not just to a story that they’ve written, but to their body of work and the types of stories that are important to them.”

In the fall of 2020, she and Bergmann published journalist Janna Brancolini’s article “Honor and the Sea,” about Honor Frost—a deep-sea diver who led numerous Mediterranean underwater archaeology explorations for decades, beginning in the 1950s. They launched a fundraising campaign and reached 137% of their $2,250 goal.

“I had never done anything like this and was very nervous to put myself out there for the campaign. As a journalist, I’ve never wanted to insert myself in the story,” Brancolini says. The editors mitigated her anxiety by offering everything from detailed technical instructions for shooting the videos to a set of questions including “Who are you as a storyteller?” “The magazine itself is a celebration of exploration, so the campaigns are really done in a spirit of journeying inward,” Brancolini notes. “It turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to think deeply about my work: what inspires me, what through-lines connect the subjects I cover, what I want to accomplish with my writing.”

In the past year, Babu and Bergmann have published 20 contributor stories and raised almost $14,000 in crowdfunding campaigns. “Our last round of campaigns was the most successful that we’ve had yet,” Babu says. “People are beginning to understand our process and our goals for the organization and our storytellers.”

While part of the revenue that sustains Hidden Compass comes from journalist crowdfunding campaigns, some of it comes from ticket sales for the monthly Speaker Series that Babu and Bergmann host online. Past speakers include a National Geographic Fellow, a global peace advocate and TED Fellow, a veteran glaciologist speaking about climate change, and former White House correspondent Rachel Scott.

“We look for speakers who fit the idea of exploration in our time,” Bergmann explains. “But that’s very broad to us. It’s not just scientific and physical exploration. It’s also ethical and historical. We’re honoring the storytellers who go to the frontiers of this modern era of exploration.”

In November, they’ll have one more revenue stream with the launching of The Alliance, their new digital community designed to further connect readers with Hidden Compass content and journalists. The editors thought about societies of exploration that collectively funded big expeditions in the past, and considered what that might look like in the 21st century.

“We asked ourselves how people might engage more deeply in this era that’s more global and inclusive, with an emphasis on values like diversity of voices and stories,” Babu says. “We wanted to create a community that supports the things that Hidden Compass supports—that is, science and journalism and history and hope and nuance. The Alliance gives readers and audience members in our speaker series another chance to engage and be part of our mission.”

The annual Alliance membership of $149 offers free admission to the speaker series, as well as exclusive “behind the scenes” content from Hidden Compass journalists. Members will also help to choose the recipient of the organization’s new Pathfinder Prize which awards expedition funding to one exploration team annually. “The idea is that our readers are more than just passive members of an audience,” Bergmann explains “They have a voice and the opportunity to participate, to connect, and to vote.”

Other media organizations have begun to take notice of the innovative business model that drives Hidden Compass. Recently, the magazine was a finalist in Newsweek’s 2021 “Future of Travel” awards, in the storytelling category. Bergmann and Babu were also accepted into Newchip’s global accelerator program, which provides them with connections, skills, and tools to bring Hidden Compass to a larger audience, and pairs the editors with an experience mentor who helps with business strategy.

“We’re excited to break out of our niche market and create a precedent for putting the humanity of journalists and storytellers in front of a global audience and inviting the public to directly support them,” Babu says. “We want to create a landscape where it’s profitable for media companies to advocate for their own journalists.”

Brancolini, who published the Hidden Compass article about Honor Frost in Autumn 2020, says she was blown away when she saw the journalist profile the editors had created for her on their site. “The website is so visually stunning, and I love that it connects all the current and past contributors,” she says. “I don’t want to say it forced me to develop a personal brand, because I hate that phrase–I think brands are for corporations, not people. But the campaign definitely pushed me to tell my own story in a way I could be excited about.”

She says the campaign’s success gave her the confidence to pursue the types of stories she wants to tell, and to invest in longer-term projects, trusting that readers will connect with in-depth storytelling. “There are other topics I’m exploring now–especially related to the intersection of art, commerce and ecology–that will require similar time investments [to the Honor Frost profile],” she says. “But thanks to the success of the Hidden Compass campaign, I trust my gut that those stories will be worth the wait.”

The campaigns are branding journalists in a new way, opening the doors to options beyond landing a staff job at a publication. Lauren Napier—the journalist who wrote about Arizona’s Camp Naco–found that the Hidden Compass campaign, and particularly the video component, garnered a great deal of attention from readers fascinated by her travelogue. She’s at work on a photo book of images she took during two visits to the camp, paired with personal and historical history. “The campaign allows me to tell the next iteration of my story with a bit more support and newly-acquired community members,” she notes.

Perhaps the time is right for other editors at other literary publications to think beyond the two line bio, and even the digital tip jar, to showcase not just poetry and prose on their websites, but to harness the power of photos and videos to bring the poet or writer to life for readers. The Hidden Compass model does indeed show that it’s possible to earn enough through creative fundraising to pay storytellers much more than merely a token amount.

Bergmann and Babu look forward to building even stronger relationships with readers and writers in the future, especially with the launch of The Alliance. “We think that storytellers are heroes,” Bergmann concludes. “They’re storytellers who deserve to be celebrated and featured and well paid for their work.”

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