Publish 2 has had the bright idea of a contest for journalists, with the much-coveted and very rare prize of… a whole, brand new, job in journalism (paid, and everything)!

Entrants need to promote themselves as ‘the future of journalism’.

“We believe journalism has a bright future, and we’re betting everything on that belief,” writes Publish2 CEO and co-founder Scott Karp on the Publish2 site.

The winner of the ‘I Am The Future Of Journalism’ Contest will bag a job with Publish2, a site and application developed to promote ‘link journalism’ in newsrooms, as reported by Journalism.co.uk in October.

The new recruit will join a team of two existing journalists and included in the offer is a $1,000 signing bonus.

Unsuccessful entrants will also receive a boost, writes Karp: Publish2 will promote them to ‘news organizations and media companies that are looking for journalists who are focused on the future and who want to help journalism evolve’.

Entries can be video, slide show, or written (or all three) but must address ‘why you believe you are the future of journalism’.

“I am the future of journalism because…”

And then it’s down to the entrant. Further information here. Publish2 users will rate the contest entries.

The contest is open to submissions until December 30, and entries can be rated up until January 9.

Similar Posts:

• Karp on the theory behind the Publish2 contest
• YouTube and Pulitzer announce five Project:Report finalists
• YouTube partners Pullitzer Center for journalism contest
• Update on Wired Journalists’ new look; Publish2 claims it now has 20 per cent of all journalists in the US
• MySpace and NBC select citizen journalism competition winners

As a result of Guardian News & Media’s acquisition of ContentNext, Media Guardian content has started to appear on paidContent:UK. Just recently the same occured vice versa: the appearance of Paid Content articles on the Media Guardian site.

In July, Journalism.co.uk reported that Guardian News & Media had bought ContentNext, behind paidcontent.org, paidContent:UK and the Indian news site contentSutra.com.

An early report by the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD column reported that according to sources it was a figure ‘north of $30 million.’

The deal marked a ’significant expansion’ of GNM’s US presence, a press statement said at the time.

Similar Posts:

• AllThingsD: Guardian to buy paidContent owners for $30m
• paidContent appears on Guardian site
• Daily Finance speculates paidContent.org’s future at GNM
• ContentNext begins UK expansion with paidContent recruitment
• links for 2008-07-12

• Why Media Gets Community Wrong – One Man and His Blog
  “most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”
  (tags: blogging)
• Lost Remote » Local business video spending to skyrocket
  “A study by The Kelsey Group predicts that small and medium-sized businesses in local markets will increase their video spending from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012.”
  (tags: ads video)
• Sky News Blogs – Editors Blog
  “Welcome to the new-look home of Sky News online. I hope you will find it useful, informative, entertaining, and an improvement on its predecessor.”
  (tags: skynews revamp)
• Associated Press Begins Member Choice Pricing Rollout
  The Associated Press will begin rolling out details of its new pricing to members this week, a plan that will return up to $21 million to its U.S. member newspapers.
  (tags: ap newspapers usa)
• Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching
  As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap
  (tags: blogging ap journalism copyright)
• SacredFacts: State of Journalism
  Alan Rusbridger ruminates at the Frontline Club, pressed by Stephen Sackur, on the changing face of news and the problems of going 24/7:
  (tags: video guardian rusbridger)
• Inside Facebook » Facebook Launching Mini-Feed Comments Today (Updated Screenshot)
  Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments later today.
  (tags: facebook)
• Semantic Journalism: Ideas | Online Journalism Blog
  Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends.
  (tags: journalism web newspapers)

Similar Posts:

• links for 2008-07-15
• links for 2008-07-04
• links for 2008-06-25
• links for 2008-07-09
• links for 2008-07-03

How to find the funds to keep your site running is the needle in the haystack for most citizen journalism start-ups.

Speaking after the closure of his own citizen journalism project, Scribblesheet, founder John Ndege wrote on Journalism.co.uk:

“Here lies a major problem for citizen journalism start-ups. It’s difficult to add value on top of news unless you have an attractive website that really connects with the wider web. However, as time passes even that is not going to save your site.”

Not wanting to be all doom and gloom, Ndege said the idea of networked journalism could forge a brighter future for citizen news with a collaboration between the amateur and the professional.

Enter: Spot.us – a community news site financed by ‘crowdfunding’.

The site, which is the brainchild of David Cohn, proposes to keep the finances on a even keel using this model.

But how will it work? The site explains:

1. An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.
2. Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.
3. A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.
4. Spot.us publishes the story in its news feeds and works with local media outlets to have the articles published more widely.

The site is yet to go live and the model yet to prove itself, but it was enough to convince judges at the Knight News Challenge to award the project a grant for $340,000 in its latest round of funding.

“It’s unknown whether people will be willing to put 10-25$ down for journalism. I think they will if the pitch is right. So – in the beginning I’m just going to focus on getting a few good stories funded and published,” says Cohn in an interview with Innovation in College Media (ICM).

Cohn, who will initially focus the site on the San Francisco area, hopes Spot.us will also provide a platform for freelance journalists looking for projects.

In a blog post, Rick Burnes, says building a ‘critical mass of funders’ is the main challenge facing the site and suggests that putting an upper limit on donations, as successful projects will then require wider backing from the audience and says there should be no upper limit to contributions.

“Why put limits on how much one person can contribute? By doing so, you raise the bar for success. It means you have to get a lot more active funders on the site before you start paying journalists.”

To my mind an upper limit would also prevent projects being skewed by contributors, who could potentially stand to gain from a pitch being pursued.

However, as Cohn says in his comments on Burnes’ post, Spot.us should not become a tool for ‘axe grinding’ between journalists and subjects:

“I want to make the site such that – it will be empowering for an individual who otherwise wouldn’t be able to hire a journalist – but would be a hassle for somebody who has a spare 5k to spend on a journalist. Spot.Us works better and achieves more of its mission – if the person with 5k is only able to donate $400 and to make up for it – has to send an email to 10 of his/her rich friends. It’s to ensure that there really is an interest in this story from a group of people – so journalists don’t turn into errand boys writing press releases.”

I’ll be following Spot.us’ progress, in particular to see what type of content receives funding and how many contributors get behind the project.

Will residents of the San Francisco bay area feel compelled to ‘employ’ journalists to report on local issues? To me it depends what value they place on the role of the journalist and whether they will see more value in that investigation than any which they could conduct for free by themselves.

The value I suppose will be that this is not a private detective-style of journalism, but is intended to enable those who don’t have the time or funds to pursue local things that matter to them to invest in the newsgathering process.

Similar Posts:

• Independent news org backs Spot.Us story
• Crowd-funded journalism project Spot.us starts first campaign
• David Cohn: Updated definitions of journalism
• DigiDave: Redefining journalism, cit-j and ‘honest communication’
• The official launch of Spot.us: video explains all

Hot on the heels of last week’s Knight News Challenge winners, two foundations have released details of journalism projects to receive funding.

New Voices – a project from the University of Maryland’s interactive journalism institute – has awarded funding of $17,000 each to 10 citizen media start-ups.

The recipients include: Cool State Online, a Californian project to set up micro bureaux covering news from the Asian and Latino communities; The Appalachian Independent, an online newspaper for the rural community in Maryland; and Family Life Behind Bars, a site where the families of prisoners can share information and experiences.

The progress of the winners (listed in full in a press release) can be viewed on the New Voices website.

Meanwhile, University of Central Lancashire journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson is to receive funding from journalism lab Sandbox for a project mapping the movements of local reporters in their communities.

Reporters from print, radio and TV would be equipped with GPS devices to monitor their movements on a normal working day, explains Dickinson in a blog post.

“The project would then attempt to develop a matrix that visually demonstrated when and where the news agendas of local communities and those of professional media organizations coincide, with a view to examining the range of elements that lead to this juxtaposition.

 

Conducted in this way the research can explore ‘randomness’, and ‘proximity’ to breaking news as a value that impacts news agendas (and says something about reseources too).”

Congratulations to Andy – we’re already looking forward to the results.

Similar Posts:

• New Voices journalism grant winners for 2009 announced
• The NUJ’s economic stimulus plan for local journalism – can it work?
• OMC09: No Andy, the NUJ wouldn’t like it
• Blogging for a cause leads to first prize for Global Voices in Zemanta competition
• Washington Times: Times launches cit-j news pages

Conde Nast (CN) has bought up technology blog Ars Technica, TechCrunch reports, adding the site to its Wired Digital network.

A price for the acquisition has not been disclosed, but is likely to match the $25 million paid by CN for Wired.com in 2006, says the report.

Similar Posts:

• TechCrunch: Why a Kindle for newspapers won’t save them
• Guardian material on paidContent:UK
• Press Gazette: Wired UK names website team
• Update on Wired Journalists’ new look; Publish2 claims it now has 20 per cent of all journalists in the US
• DMGT digital revenues boosted by search portals while local media profits fall

The stressed state of the US economy is causing advertising budgets to shrink – causing News Corp to miss its ambitious online revenue target of one billion dollars by ten per cent, Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.

Reuters reported that the media tycoon claimed Fox Interactive Media – which runs the online part of his US empire, including MySpace – will however have “well over” $1 billion in revenue in the 2009 financial year.

Similar Posts:

• Media Post: NAA reports shows online newspaper ad revenue down 13 per cent in first quarter
• Press Gazette: Subscriptions to WSJ.com rise by 88 per cent
• Mashable: Local accounting for 74 per cent of advertising revenue on Facebook, says report
• Reuters: New video news service debuts in June
• Reuters: UK online ads up 21 per cent despite fall in overall ad market

CNET is reporting that Twitter last week took an additional $15 million or $20 million in funding last week.

A source told News.com about the extra money being made available to the company.

Last summer it took a first round funding of $5 million.

Similar Posts:

• Paid Content: Ning raises 60m dollars – worth 500m
• What would a UK-based ProPublica look like?
• FT.com: GNM considers Observer’s future in digital age
• paidContent:UK: Subscription service SubHub secures new funding
• News.com: Is Twitter so addictive that we can’t live without it?

Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.

Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.

The initiative applies to news stories, rather than blogs, journals, groups, photos or video, and is calculated on the number of news stories each citizen journalist uploads rather than purely on the popularity of individual posts.

Citizen journalists who would like to be paid for their contributions must first have their work approved by the Digital Journal board to ensure they ‘have a solid understanding of spelling and grammar, and can show an ability to find and research relevant news.’

The move distinguishes the social news site from competitors such as Newsvine and Norg as the first online community to share a portion of revenue, albeit to a small percentage of its total users.

Similar Posts:

• News.com: Citizen news site Helium draws heat from community over planned changes to payment
• Food journalists launch Zester Daily to combat loss of Gourmet
• Wall Street Journal appoints chief technology officer
• RMRF: Regional Media Research Forum in new web launch
• CJR takes on redundant journalists