I'm slaving away on the book proposal as well as pitching articles to magazines, which is why you're not hearing much from me, but Calpundit.com has a decent little debate going in his comments section on a business model for independent journalism that David Appell and yours truly are working at.
In essence, Kevin is speculating on a kind of eBay for independent journalists, in which story ideas are pitched to readers and then the writer entertains bids from readers. Or, as Kevin puts it: "Readers could suggest stories and see if there are any reporters willing to follow them up."
It's an interesting thought, but I have no idea how to make it work technically. I'm sure some hot-shot programmer out there could encode the new rules of the freelance economy into an online service. But the two real questions are, can the writer make enough income from this to make it worth his or her while and will the readers get the quality that rivals what they can get from "mainstream" media.
I've been doodling a bit on a business model for Back-to-Iraq, but this is an idea I hadn't thought of. (I don't really have an entrepreneurial brain, sad to say.) Thoughts from you guys? Opinions?
Debate on economics of pay-to-read independent journalism
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About me
Hi there! Thanks for stopping in. I'm Christopher Allbritton, former AP and New York Daily News reporter. In 2002, I went stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern part of Iraq outside Saddam's direct control, looking for stories. (Some might call it "looking for trouble.") In March 2003, I made it back in time for the war, becoming the Web's first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger. With the support of thousands of readers, we raised almost $15,000. You can read my dispatches here. It was one of the moments in journalism when everything worked. It was a grand -- and successful -- experiment in independent journalism. In 2004, I moved to Iraq, where I would spend the next two years. It was a raucous, scary and exciting place with a lot of news going on. But I've since moved on to Beirut and the wider region. I now report for a variety of outlets.
a subscription-based service with a few persons, like yourself, operating under a collective umbrella, each taking on suggested research from subscribers. Pay-per-article would seem not to be as lucrative as you need it to be, whereas a collective would be far more ‘noticeable’ and marketable from a sales perspective. What plans have you investigated to date?
I’d rather support a journalist or a journalism collective than bid on stories. Much of that is because I don’t think that markets are the best means for representing group preferences: as long as certain individuals have a disproportionate share of group resources, their choices can effectively nullify those of the majority. In the case of a journalists giving out different stories for bid, those with deep enough pockets can bury any particular story by bidding up another one.
Here’s another unpleasant marketization scenario: if investors can short stocks—sell stocks they do not own in inticipation of a fall in price—why not have media content bidders put in negative bids (kill fee is the term, yes?) on proposed stories? The effect is the same as bidding up story B to kill story A, but it’s a lot creepier when couched in these terms.
I think content aggregation, like warblogs.cc, could provide showcases for independent journalists to make the case for their work. In fact, why don’t you guys put up a PayPal button there to support the group’s work? Right now individual bloggers are weak competition for large media, but a broad and rich content aggregation site could make a newspaper start looking over its shoulder.<wishfulThinkingButStill />
I’d like to put up a PayPal bug, but the question is how does it get distributed to the individual authors? Is there a way to do this automatically?
Put up a website where journalists outline stories and request donations. Put a paypal bug beside each one. Let the people vote with their clicks :-) This is very KISS (keep it simple, stupid!)
There’s an article on wired.com that talks about a citizen run newspaper. It looks like a very interesting concept. It’d be nice to see something like this in the US.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58856,00.html
I don’t know if there’s a way PayPal can allocate a payment across several different people—there’s always the old fashioned way of having one person get it and dole it out to everyone else. <stupidGrin /> Seriously though, I’d be surprised if something like this wasn’t available. If not, I suppose you could set up a business checking account and have the payments be remitted there.
Doesn’t Mother Jones use some similar concept? They publish and pay investigative journalists on all kinds of matters, readers pay Mother Jones.
Better than pay-pal is e-gold, of course do both is probably a good thing.
e-gold only takes seconds to open an account and they don’t pull any of the nasties that paypal can.
http://188428.e-gold.com thats how easy it is.
cya, Andrew…
subscription-based service with a few persons, like yourself, operating under a collective umbrella, each taking on suggested research from subscribers. Pay-per-article would seem not to be as lucrative as you need it to be, whereas a collective would be far more ‘noticeable’ and marketable from a sales perspective. What plans have you investigated to date?