JournalismCrisis
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context : OnJournalism
DaveWiner thinks Journalism is dying : http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/02/howWillWeGetOurNews.html
Though he's been banging on about HowToMakeMoneyOnTheInternet for a while.
Now he's asking for what to do instead.
I made a suggestion inspired by RiverOfNews and VotedNews :
Maybe a site only for "scoops", ie. breaking news stories which haven't been seen anywhere else online.
You have some Digg-style voting. Then, after giving readers 24 hours to challenge the originality of the story (by finding earlier references), the highest voted (most important, sorta) story of the day wins a cash-prize. If someone finds it elsewhere online, then you don't give the prize. (But you do give something to the guy who found out it wasn't original.)
Basically you do the opposite of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. You ruthlessly reward "scoopness". Pay for the prize by charging subscribers a few dollars for a feed which has the stories an hour earlier than they appear on the site. For real news junkies, an hour early may be worth a subscription of 10 dollars a month. (A hundred thousand subscribers gives you a million dollars a month from which you get your prize-money and your costs.)
Sell further analysis services around that feed. Could be automatically generated statistics, could be expert opinion, could be classification, could be ad-supported blog commentary, could be print-on-demand hard copy.
State of the media 2009
There's a newspaper crisis:
- Is it also a JournalismCrisis?
- ClayShirky drives the nail into the newspaper industry : http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
- Evidence that failing local papers is bad for democracy : http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumblingandmumbling/2009/04/newspapers-democracy.html