Crowdfunding has been growing explosively in all the creative sectors. It acts as a platform, matching innovators with those who need innovation, and thus is reshaping which ideas come to market. In connecting directly creators and entrepreneurs with customers and funders, its role goes far more than a new way of raising funds, it permits to get comments, information and support from communities of funders ("backers") and, in this way, may transform the traditional industrial-driven market into a more democratic and open one. This aspect is of special importance for the media sector, in general, and press, in particular. Indeed, in the context of industry concentration (Milyo, 2007, Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010) and high dependence on the advertising incomes (Garcia Pires, 2014, Anderson & Gabszewicz, 2006, Gabszewicz & Sonnac, 2006), the potential of crowdfunding as a new source of independence, public participation, and consequently, information diversity, becomes crucial. To our knowledge, few studies address the question of the impact of new crowdfunding-based revenue models on the press sector, partially because of its recent nature. What is the potential of this revenue model in the press sector and media in general? Could it really be a source of better performance, i.e. information quality and diversity, or else it represents just an additional source of revenue? How does this new revenue model articulate with other business models' components? These are the questions addressed in our paper. This study relies on the empirical analysis of the journalistic projects published on the two main French crowdfunding platforms KissKissBankBank and Ulule. The dataset has been directly collected from the firms' SQL database and contains about 2,084 projects for period from 2013 to 2016. It includes detailed information related to projects' characteristics, their creators and contributors. Firstly, we use this data to study to what extent the previous findings on the economic potential of the crowdfunding in general are applicable to the press sector in particular. Secondly, by selecting a representative original dataset of 130 journalistic projects and using mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches we focus on the problem of the journalistic projects' quality, content originality, sources reliability and diversity of topics. Such definition of pluralism is based on the previous studies in the area and completes them with the new "disparity" dimension (Napoli, 2001; Rebillard, 2012). Empirical literature in the domain of crowdfunding provides important insights on the impact of various social and economic factors on the economic success of the crowdfunding projects (Mollick 2013b; Mitra and Gilbert 2014; A. K. Agrawal et al., 2011; Colombo et al., 2015; Burtch et al., 2013; Kuppuswamy and Bayus 2013; Mollick and Nanda 2014; Agrawal et al., 2013). However, little is known about (1) the generalizability of these findings to different kinds of creative projects (i.e. music, movie, applications and so on); (2) the role of the platform-specific community dynamics; (3) and the quality of innovative and creative projects that are funded by this way. To fill this gap and to take into account the sector's specificity, we assess the role of comments and the funders' commitment, the reputation of journalist and her communication skills, the effect of the ‘wisdom of the crowd' generated by the communities created with the project, and the capacity of journalist to be independent from the social pressure of individual funders. 2 Therefore the contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it focuses on the particular industrial sectors and puts forward the idea, that the potential of crowdfunding is context-specific. Secondly, it proposes to distinguish and to compare the determinants of economic and editorial success of the crowdfunded projects. In this view, the paper spotlights the fact that, at least in the press sector, whereas the number of "backers" is of special importance for the economic results of the project, the number and the nature of contributors' comments represent the key determinants of the editorial quality of the project. Finally, the paper provides some methodological insights on the ways to measure and to evaluate the quality of media projects.