PaidContent:UK reports on a new browser extension, BreakThePayWall.
Available for Internet Explorer and, soon, Firefox, BreakThePayWall works mainly – and merely – by deleting cookies sites use to limit the number of stories users can read before having to subscribe. Deleting the cookies means the publisher’s site forgets how close the reader is to the “pay up” threshold.
A story you’ll find in Newsquest’s Streatham Guardian, but not in its rival, the Tindle-owned South London Press – an extract:
A journalist from our rival newspaper the South London Press has admitted assaulting a senior Lambeth councillor at a glittering charity fundraiser.
Chief reporter Greg Truscott pushed Councillor Mark Bennett at the Mayor of Lambeth’s annual fundraising dinner, held on a cruise boat on the Thames on Wednesday, March 3.
He was cautioned by police after admitting an offence of common assault on the cabinet member for community safety, when interviewed at Brixton police station last Wednesday.
Lambeth Council has now banned him from all its buildings and events – including the town hall and the borough’s leisure centres.
Of course, it was on the blogs first…
Photojournalism professor Ken Kobre takes a look at Harvard’s Nieman Report and its visual journalism feature.
We had to ignore our email inbox and take the phone off the hook find the requisite time to delve into it.
I managed to grab a few minutes with both the Knight Center’s Dan Gillmor and BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit 2010 to talk about the future of community generated journalism.
Rory Cellan-Jones thinks that “the place where citizen journalism is actually triumphing is Wikipedia”.
“It is becoming an instant news agency as well as a kind of journal of record and deep explanation of events, in a way the newspapers might find difficult to compete with.” But speaking as a journalist, he finds unpaid contribution based models, such as the Huffington Post’s, a “difficult” concept.
This and more (on Spotify and predictions for 2011) in this AudioBoo:
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, and advisor to crowd-sourced site Spot.us, says there are questions to raise about unpaid models and sustainability. “People who run these sites should of course be fully aware there will be an ebb and flow of active users, that some people will start and then give up, and then some will be highly committed.” Citing fellow panellist iVillage network general manager Rebecca Miskin’s experience, he described how some unpaid community moderators eventually become paid employees.
Audio: Dan Gillmor on crowdsourced journalism:
Heard of the Young Turks? No? Well, according to its founder you will soon, because it’s going to demolish the mainstream media in America. In fact, it could win an online poll against Jesus, he said.
The ‘first live, daily webcast on the internet,’ the alternative show has had over 207 million views on YouTube. It charges $10 a month for its full content option; and takes $2.5 for every 1,000 views on YouTube.
During one of the liveliest parts of the day at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit, at the final keynote roundtable, Cenk Uygur (pictured left) said:
“Old media is a lot of trouble. It’s a question of what’s going to survive and what’s not going to survive. Are newspapers in America going to survive? Hell no, no way.”
Newspapers might have only ten per cent of the advertising revenue next year (down from around 50 per cent in the 1950s, Uygur said) but that was too much in his opinion: “It shouldn’t be anywhere near 10 per cent. As they say here in Britain that’s mental.”
Shaking off a heckler, Uygur said that his online talkshow’s content could easily compete: “NBC’s content is nowhere near as good as mine”.
But the best quote: “Our viewers are awesome; we call them the TYT army: we can never lose an online poll. We can do an online poll against Jesus and we will win.”
Richard Titus was shocked to discover that one of Associated Northcliffe Digital’s portfolio businesses was just throwing away its transaction data, when he first started as CEO.
They told him they wiped it each week: “Well, hard drives are expensive.”
Data is the asset, and a really big opportunity for businesses, he said at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit.
Audio:
“It’s very hard to copy; it’s very hard to steal; it’s very hard to pirate and it has incredible large scarcity.
“Data with its scarcity is one of the most important assets most businesses have today. Most businesses give it away; don’t collect it; they wipe it off their hard drives.”
AND, the digital consumer division of DMGT, looks after Associated and Northcliffe digital media sites, as well as online classified sites such as Jobsite.co.uk, FindaProperty.com & Primelocation.com. A significant part of its business is in Eastern Europe, Titus said, where its classified sites are ‘market leaders’.
Its new hyperlocal network Local People was focussed around bringing community-oriented information to groups of 20-30,000 people.
Titus, who previously worked for the BBC, also emphasised the potential to make advertising money out of small and medium enterprises, he said.
Titus said that the “the thing that most matters in digital today is your relationship with the customer”.
As reported by Journalism.co.uk on Wednesday, the BBC will today depart from normal broadcast methods and experiment with a global live translation event, using its 13 different language services.
The primary house rule of SuperPower Nation is that different languages must be used. Will it work? The event’s editor Mark Sandell, who also edits World Have Your Say on the World Service, said he doesn’t know.
“This is the whole point of it – there’s got to be a sense that this is an experiment,” he told Journalism.co.uk. “I have no idea whether it will work in this format – the experimentation is crucial.”
“People have to go with the fact that there are going to be some messy moments,” he said, but he hopes there will be “some magic in there too”.
This simultaneous transmission will put pay to the “usual hierarchy of TV pulling rank on radio,” says Sandell. “It’s going to be a little bit rough and ready.”
The hub in London is central, but not the main element of the event, he says: “It could be anywhere. The people in the room are no more or no less important than those in an internet cafe in Dhaka.”
At the London base, actors will play out Romeo and Juliet – in their own languages. Musicians will collaborate – in their own languages. A ‘chat roulette’ will see different participants thrown together in conversation.
The initial idea of the entire project, says Sandell, was to break down as many language barriers as possible and see what real-time conversations occur when English is no longer the default.
The Guardian’s online discussion site, Comment is Free, has turned four, and to celebrate the occasion it has opened up its commissioning process to the users, the results of which can be seen at this link.
CiF editor Matt Seaton writes today:
It seems a good moment then, this fourth birthday, to mark the evolution of Cif in this direction by having thrown open the commissioning of articles to you, our users. Obviously, it’s our selection of your ideas – not easy, as there were multitudes to pick from – and depending on what happens news-wise today, we may feel compelled to add a few pieces of our own devising. But essentially, we’re celebrating today by having you guys guest-edit the site. It’s a way of saying thank you, as the commissioning we do based on suggestions in the You tell us threads is really helping Cif- bringing a freshness and diversity to the site.
From the ‘process journalism’ session at the SXSW Interactive event in Texas comes a discussion about Wikipedia as a news source. ReadWriteWeb reports:
Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection.
“There’s no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it’s real-time aggregation,” Pantages [Moka Pantages, WikiMedia communications officer] said.
So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.
Last year, a new quarterly print-only food magazine launched, designed, it says, to give established writers “a place for work that would not be published elsewhere; new writers a place to show themselves and experts in other fields an opportunity to write about our favourite subject”.
Behind the project is Fire & Knives founder and freelance food writer Tim Hayward. To the annoyance of some photographers, Hayward recently tweeted: “Would like to commission some foodblogger photographers for an @FireandKnives project. Odd brief. No money.”
The Twitter backlash from professional photographers came (a selection):
@Timgander: “Guardian’s @timhayward is looking for a food photographer with independent means of income as there’s no pay for the work. #fail”
@ABCphoto: @timhayward What’s the difference between a plumber and a photographer? You don’t expect plumbers to work for free.
@chickenthieves: @timhayward sorry, Cant seem to pay the bills when I work for free…
@jhphotographer: @timhayward – if you can’t afford photography for a food magazine then you can’t afford to be in business.
Tim Hayward responded to all, at length, via Twitter. He’s not in business yet, he says. Think of it like a ‘blog someone had the brains to put through a printer,’ he adds.
Here’s how he responded to the criticism in full, when Journalism.co.uk got in touch:
Responding to the backlash:
The intention was to recruit a few foodbloggers to collaborate on a shoot which would amusingly subvert mainstream foodporn.
As with the written material in the magazine, it would be unpaid and would credit the blogger and his/her site. If any of the photographers (or more accurately agents) who snapped at the story had cared to discuss it sensibly they might have seen that.
Fortunately, writing for the Guardian food blog for so long has given me a pretty realistic idea of how much thought punters engage in before hitting the send key. It also makes me entirely resilient to flaming.
It’s important to reiterate how we’re working at Fire & Knives. About one third of our features come from established foodwriters, most of whom are happy to supply the kind of long form, specialised foodwriting that none of the mainstream food press are paying for at the moment. The rest of the features come from food bloggers or new food writers, also keen to show off their best work in a good looking format.
We have a large circulation list of influential media people with commissioning powers and the magazine is distributed to them for free. This means that, though we can’t offer money at this stage, we can offer everyone involved an excellent showcase for their work.
The funny thing is that since the tweet went out I’ve had 75 responses from foodbloggers all over the world plus a dozen from professional food photographers who think the idea of being involved in something like this might be fun and good for their profile.
The mainstream media dilemma that inspired Fire and Knives:
Most of us in the food field are now having to work across all media. We’re doing on and offline work, TV, radio and books in an attempt to make a living doing what we love. All of us give work away in some form or another. We appear on TV shows as ‘pundits’ for nothing or for risible ‘sofa fees’ and the producers tell us it’s ‘good for our profile’.
We answer phonecalls from subs at national newspapers asking for ‘just a quick hundred about what spring salads mean to you – it’s good for profile’ only to find our unpaid contribution has been glued in with nine others to magic a 1000 word feature out of nowhere for nothing.
Book advances have dropped to a stage where agents are telling us we need to maintain journalistic and educational work in order to afford to play. At the very least we’re supposed to stick our work out there for nothing on our blogs in the hope that some editor will pick us up in a desperate trawl for a last minute idea – though what more often happens is that the idea is lifted whole and passed on to a staff writer. In my own case, I spend all the time I have between paid work – and believe me there’s plenty – editing a bloody magazine and stuffing envelopes for nothing.
Raising foodie writers’ profiles
But it’s not ‘for nothing’. I do it for the same reason the contributors do. It helps to raise profile and I’d rather my best work was out there being read by food lovers than being rejected by an editor who wants all the complicated bits taken out and as many references as possible to celebrity chefs jammed back in. Favbet casino has a mobile app available for download on iOS and Android devices – Lope bet app . The mobile app is optimized for easy navigation and provides users with all the features and capabilities of the desktop version.
Of course, there would be money for everyone if we took advertising – but we don’t take advertising because then we’d have to worry about increasing our audience and dumbing down to do so.
So we use the subs to pay for production, printing and distribution and right now, that doesn’t leave any change – in fact I’m still putting money in.
We will, of course, pay as soon as we can. But looking at the figures, that’s unlikely to be this year.
Fire & Knives: the story so far
On the positive side, what this little spat has proved is in itself interesting. We are tiny.
We’ve yet to sell the last quarter of our first print run of 2000 copies (and bear in mind the huge list that gets it gratis) – they’re sitting here in my office as I type this – but because we’ve used digital print technology, great design, we’re working with enthusiastic writers with an intelligent attitude to their own careers, we’ve thought cleverly and we’ve used new media to promote ourselves and raise profile: people like the rabid photographer contingent are fooled into thinking we’re a major player.
We’re out there, creating a fuss like a national magazine while we have the scale, business model and budget of a bedroom printed fanzine, by and for a microscopic audience of like-minded geeks. If it helps, think of us as a blog someone had the brains to stick through a printer.
The funny thing is that I trained originally as a photographer and freelanced for several years. I’m totally versed in the ‘never do anything for free’ logic drummed into us since birth.
But I also spent many years working in media and marketing and I know that the only way any of us can hope to survive is by efficient management of personal brands. Our contributors are doing that well.
As am I by continuing to be involved in this discussion – for which, by the way, I assume I’m not getting a fee – [no, you’re not, Ed.] instead of getting back to writing a bloody recipe for sorrel soup which may or may not, make me £20.
No. A foodie can’t live on fresh air. On the other hand, any creative working in the media at the moment can’t afford not to promote themselves and their work at its very best.
Maybe you have an agent getting the work in, in which case you’re paying 15 per cent. Me, I prefer to give away a little work and raise profile with interesting and creative projects. Do I think special interest writing will become something done for love not money? In the traditional sense of ‘writing’ absolutely.
If anyone thinks they can make a living sitting at a keyboard writing about food they’d better have a private income. If, on the other hand, they want to make a living involved in the food media, they can if they think broadly enough about how they sell themselves.
When you think about doing it for free, ask yourself this, would I rather write rubbish for a lifestyle magazine for a laughable fee, or a) write something great and shove it in the public domain on my blog, b) write a series of proposals and pay an agent to flog them or c) write something beautiful, the way I want it, put it in a beautiful magazine and know it’s going to seen by everyone of any importance in my industry.
If you’re still sat at an Underwood, troubling the Tippex then the answer is probably a) if you want to eat, the answer is c). It’s not working for free, it’s where I’m choosing to put my marketing effort.
But then, I would say that. I’m not a proper writer. I’m a working food hack.
That’s Tim Hayward’s take. Over to you, in the comments, or by tweet.