Tag Archives: healthcare plan

Allvoices.com to offer healthcare plan for its US citizen journalists

Citizen journalism site Allvoices is to offer a healthcare plan – at a cost – to its regular contributors in the US, it announced last week. It’s open to all its users who participate in its journalism incentive scheme and produce 15 new articles per month.

We believe health care is a basic human right, even though it is still dependent upon a less-than-perfect system which keeps it from those in our society who are most in need.  Many within that group are recently un- or under-employed journalists.  These are talented people who have a valuable, necessary skill to contribute but can’t because of consolidation within the media industry.

The site has plans to introduce other benefits it says:

…We see this as a small and very necessary step toward changing the future of journalism as we know it.  The plan we now have in place is a great start for a citizen media site, but we’re cognizant of what else is needed; additional benefits will be introduced over time as we continue to grow.  For a while we’ve been soliciting feedback from our community on other benefits they’d like to see in return for their work, and we intend on delivering.  We’re committed to providing an environment where people can not just augment their living by writing for Allvoices, but can make their living here if they so choose.

Journalism.co.uk readers in the US will have to tell us how the plan shapes up next to other alternatives…

In January we reported how AllVoices, with five million unique visitors a month and 275,000 reporters, plans to develop its presence in hyperlocal and global markets.

FT.com: ‘There will be a transition to people paying for the internet,’ says Liberty Media chairman

A couple of things extremely pertinent to the paid content debate in a ‘view from the top’ interview on FT.com.

It’s with Liberty Media chairman, John Malone, described by the FT’s Richard Milne as ‘one of the most powerful figures in the media world’. He controls a ‘sprawling empire of assets’ including  DirecTV, the Discovery Channel, QVC, the Atlanta Braves baseball team and a company focused on Cable TV, Liberty Global.

Two extracts from the interview:

“How bad is the outlook for the media industry right now?”

“The media has lots of different elements in it. Probably at the bottom would be local, because local advertising has been the most adversely affected. Newsprint is probably the most damaged media going forward. Cable television has been OK. It continues to grow, a little slower than we’d like. The broadcast networks are getting beaten up, but not as bad on their national side as on their local side (…)”

and:

A big debate in media is: can you get consumers to pay for online content?

“There will be a transition to people paying for [the] internet. Unfortunately, a lot of the people promoting the internet have other monetisation theories, such as search, which is ‘free’ to the consumer. Believe me, it’s not free to the retailer. The real question is: can you get people to pay for content on the internet? That will happen over time. If you’re a newspaper publisher and you’re giving information free on the internet and charging a subscription fee [for the paper], I don’t understand the logic.”

Full interview at this link…

And this:

“Long or short? Newspapers? Short James Murdoch? Long Hedge fund regulation? Long Share prices? Neutral The European economy? Short Nicolas Sarkozy? Long Ben Bernanke? Long Barack Obama’s healthcare plan? Disaster – short Twitter? Neutral Barry Diller? Long.”