Democratizing Journalism

[sulla]

I have an idea I wanted to get feedback on. Please let me know what you think either for or against.

OK the idea is to start an open news site that splits ad income on each story with the journalist. The journalist uploads video, writing, photo essay etc. They fill out a form with it that has information on date, world location, subject etc. Then the readers rate each story/journalist on trust, acuraracy, readability, bias etc. Thats the basics.

[Bill]

No thanks. Too random for me. If the concerns noted below were addressed, it wouldn't be open news, though.

As Journalist: What do they want me to write/photograph? I'm not an assignments editor. And who is going to edit my work? I'm an artist of the word/image, not an editor. Why should I give up any ad revenue on my self-published pieces, now that setting up a site/blog and getting "Ads provided by Google" is so easy and cheap, not to mention the sweet little payments from PayPal? Google the subject and find me. No middlemen needed. With blogs, journalism is already democratized.

As Reader/Viewer: If I want unedited journalism, I can Google the subject and find self-published pieces all day long. Blogs-love em, hate em. On the other hand, publication sites are good. They have editors who provide an environment I can count on. The stories don't ramble on forever. The photo essays are so coherent that a picture editor must be involved.

As Publisher: 130 photos of their daughter carrying a spear in the school play and 10,000 words about the pride in being a 50 year old parent with a 10 year old child! Don't they know the price of bandwidth? Who do they think is going to read that? Periods and commas are free. Use them. At least when I was in vanity publishing I could have charged them an arm and a leg, shipped a couple of boxes of books, made a nice little profit. Oh well, it doesn't matter. The latest batch of cartoons will get us firebombed, anyway.

I like Arts & Letters Daily at http://www.aldaily.com/ for referrals to good stories, most of which are in newspapers and magazines. A number of the columnist links send you to the columnist's Web site, not to a publication. No photo referrals. The site is not supported by ad income. It is a service of a journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is supported by subscriptions and advertising.

[sulla]

Thanks for the well thought out reply Bill.

1. Your first main objection seems to be seems to be that you could make more running your own blog. The problem with this is you asume you will be listed high enough on Google to get the traffic. As you know people only ever go to the first few pages on Google for any subject. What is far more likely is that you and the vast majority of other self bloggers/self publishers will will never get any traffic. Yes a few will do will like RocketBoom etc, but most will not. One reason for putting all this together in a large site is becouse it will help build traffic to the main site and to each story and journalist.

2. You ask what they want you to write/photograph. Their are two parts to this. Readers would suggest and vote on subjects. They would be both broad and narrow what they want. Also many journalists have stories they would like to tell.

3. As for editors for a fee we could have editors available. Some people would use them some would not. The use of an editor would me noted on the list of details and as a sorting option for articles.

4. As for stories that ramble on for ever and picture essays that are terrible thats where the user rating would come in. The best work would rise to the top. The user ratings are very important. After you get enough they would give you a good overview of readability, accuracy, bias etc. Also in many ways this acts like a free open source editor. It gives journalists the feedback on what the problems are with their writing etc.

Any way thanks again for the questions and cocerns.

[Bill]

Good reply. I hoped that my post would either prompt reflection on the concept or bring out answers to questions that had already been considered. I like the saying, "Perfection is the enmy of the good." At some point you have to go ahead and start the project if you have arrived at the "Good" state, perfecting it while operational. I look forward to seeing it.

Bill