Paying, er, taking advantage of Citizen Journalists |
Note to budding ‘Citizen Journalists’ who actually want to be paid for their writing the following is not a good deal. I’m surprised that Dan Gillmor didn’t at least mention that this “pay” needs to come with several asterisks. Dan wrote used the word “applause” but what is he applauding? It all sounds rosey when you hear the pitch: 
GetLocalNews.com, a nationwide network of 6,000 local news sites, is planning to share its advertising revenue with thousands of volunteer writers.
Cool concept, citizens write local news and other human interest stories and receive a 50% split of the ad revenue generated based on the page views of their articles. They calcuate this based on the total amount of page views and money earned. Once the author reaches $25 they’ll send them a check, but — and here’s the sucktacular fine print — if after four quarters the author hasn’t reached $25, then the account will be zeroed out.
This reminds me a bit of epinions.com, the site where you can spend tons of hours writing reviews of products and services and be lucky to make pennies. However, at least epinions doesn’t zero your account after a year if you don’t make the minimum payout.
To make matters even worse, check out what it says at the end of the article:
Its most frequently visited site, BeniciaNews.com, covers the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Benicia, Calif., and gets as many as5,000page views per month, Canon said.
My bolding on the numbers. So they calculate 1,000 page views to be about $2-5 and their busiest community site only generates 5,000 page views? Yowsa, this doesn’t really look to me like the intention is to pay anybody for anything. Instead it seems like they just want to generate a bunch of free articles from gullible people.
Now back to Gillmor’s applause. Is he applauding the fact that citizens can write in various communities? I think one would more often than not get more attention contacting local publications than using a network like this one. Or, aspiring citizen journalists, here’s another idea:
Start your own community based blog and/or news site, throw up Google Adsense and you’ll have about a 99.9999% chance of making more money than you ever will with this ‘arrangement.’
I know, it’s not about the money. It’s about other things. Riiiight. Then why is this network offering to pay anything then?
Update 4/10/2005: After writing this, I saw that darkmoon had already dismantled this deal.
Update 4/11/2005: Edgar Canon, CEO GetLocalNews.com stopped by in the comments and said that CNET misprinted the correct monthly traffic numbers for BeniciaNews.com — they actually receive 500,000 page views a month (that’s a considerable misprint, CNET). That’s certainly more enticing from an exposure point of view, but I’d be curious to see the numbers for what one average article on their network typically generates. Since Mr. Canon indicates that they have a track record then it should be no problem producing these figures. I’m sort of surprised that they weren’t/aren’t detailed in the agreement.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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*laugh* nice to see more people reading the fine print.
Comment by darkmoon — April 11, 2005 @ 6:31 am PST
As we told “darkmoon” in a similar comment we posted on his site, we appreciate the time you took to critique our new payment plan for citizen journalists. Any feedback we get is helpful to us as we tweak this program.
We do think that you’ve focused on negatives and ignored the positive aspects of our network and the payment plan.
One correction: The CNET article originally had an an incorrect figure on the page views for our BeniciaNews.com site. It has since been corrected to say the site gets 500,000 page views a month. For a town of about 27,000, that bodes well for the potential traffic of the network.
Our system can syndicate content to any or all of our 50,000-plus local and topical sites, so it creates a new kind of content distribution system completely unlike blogs. We don’t see ourselves competing with blogs. By all means people should start their own blogs, and then post selected content/articles including links back to their blogs on our network. The blogger generates traffic and if the content is popular, it could get syndicated, which both generates income for the blogger from us and traffic and inbound links to the blog. I don’t see how anyone is being taken advantage of here.
We also offer a venue for the person who doesn’t want to take the time or isn’t savvy enough to set up a blog, but wants to post an article or two every week. (A blog updated that infrequently would have trouble sustaining traffic.) We give those folks a simple way of publishing when they want and getting paid for it.
Regarding your criticisms (and those of darkmoon) on design, payout amounts, and our goals:
1) Design (this was from darkmoon): We agree with the basic point, that the design needs a lot of work. In fact, that’s our primary focus right now. We hope to unveil a redesign soon.
2) Why pay contributors only when they have reached $25 in earnings? Why zero out their accounts after four quarters? Good questions. It costs a great deal to account for and generate small checks, so we had to set some limit. We can look into making the cut-off period longer. And remember we aggregate all the page views generated from all of an author’s content posted at any time anywhere in our network, so the citizen journalist is building a portfolio of work that generates income as long as anyone reads it. Does this system benefit regular authors more than the one-shot contributors? Yes, but we don’t think that’s a bad thing, as it’s good for us and good for our authors and readers.
3) Darkmoon said, “it is obvious that their goals are not for citizen journalists, but for advertisers.” (You seem to concur with this comment when you say, “I know, it’s not about the money. It’s about other things. Riiiight.”) This criticism shows a lack of background about our track record. In many instances, we have put a premium on news content and reader-generated interactivity at the expense of advertising. Example: On our BeniciaNews.com site, we allow readers to post comments in our Yellow Pages about local businesses. We did this because we believe that consumers should be able to hold businesses accountable in a way that can be shared by the community. Another: Our classifieds are interactive, allowing prospective buyers to post questions and comments right there in the ad.
I look foward to furthur comments, complaints and suggestions.
Edgar Canon, CEO GetLocalNews.com
Comment by Edgar Canon — April 11, 2005 @ 5:39 pm PST
Thanks for stopping by, Edgar, and providing the detailed response.
I didn’t see any problem with $25 as a cut-off fee for sending a check. Epinions is only $10, Adsense is $100 and others vary every between. Actually, I had more of a problem with the zeroing out of the account. That is a huge negative on your program and I’m glad to hear you’ll change that, because if you don’t then that’s a baaad thing.
You mentioned your track record. Well, doesn’t that record include researching and evaluating other affiliate programs, payment structures, etc? No program that I know of or would ever do any business with zeroes out accounts after one year, especially if the writer/member/affiliate is still active. Forgive me, sir, but that just sounds outright crooked.
I do see you mentioned there was a misprint on CNET’s part (I’ll correct the text above to reflect this based on your commentary) and I think you can see how that futher helped to spin the article in the direction.
I think Dan Gillmor, who left a great writing gig, to evangelize Citizen Journalism, didn’t truly evaluate your program and instead was drinking the kool-aid over the concept of citizen journalism which is so not about the money.
I do understand for accounting reasons you might need to set some arbitrary period to deal with outstanding monies in writer’s accounts, but I’d make that a lot further out into the future like maybe after five or more years plus of inactivity. Meaning you take the money only after the writer hasn’t contributed anything for that period of time and doesn’t meet your minimum level to cut a check for accounting. This way you aren’t penalizing writers who make two bits an article and write one article a month.
As for focusing only on the negative? Sorry, you aren’t a charitable organization, which I think is more aligned with true citizen journalism.
So, in being a business, you’ll have to accept that some people aren’t going to be enamored over your business model. You can spin the writer’s ego and vanity as “look at all the exposure you’ll get” and oh, the “community services” and yadda, yadda, but if that’s really what you want to provide — community services — then you’d pay the writers above sweatshop labor rates instead of expecting them to contribute for nothing OR be a 403c nonprofit and give the money earned — after expenses — back to the communities you are serving. Now that would be something I could get behind and support.
Now do you understand exactly what I meant by this being about the money?
Your program is giving no numbers or guarantees to the writers and is based on figures that even Google doesn’t allow anybody to talk about, so it all has to be taken on your word — your reputation — the stats that only you have access to and can allow access to — and your track record, as you put it.
Please, I’d love to be wrong on this, so please do come back when you have some non-shilled Citizen Journalists that are turning at least high four to low five figures a month — or when you donate a significant amount of the monies earned back to the communities you are profiting from — and I’ll be happy to write a follow-up piece explaining how wrong I was and how great your program is for citizen journalists.
In the meantime, the only people who will make any significant money in your program are writers who could easily do it without your network from the get-go and yourselves, big surprise there.
That’s my opinion, Edgar, sorry. Nice try though.
Comment by TDavid — April 11, 2005 @ 6:42 pm PST
Mr. Canon. - I just realized that you basically copy and pasted the same response in three different places (this blog, Dan Gillmor’s and darkmoon’s) — at least! My comments above were made thinking that you actually took the time to make this long, detailed reply here. I did see the references to darkmoon and some quotes of what’s been discussed but a couple of your generic comments didn’t make sense. Now I see why!
What is this, some sort of canned crossposting flailing PR response? Lame, lame, lame. This gives me an even dimmer view of the situation, sir.
Maybe on the to-do list should be to get a blog (if you don’t already have one, of course) and then you could trackback to the various places where trackbacks were left, that makes a heck of a lot more sense than posting the same long response in comments in multiple places, plus it doesn’t look so obviously like you are on some sort of damage control campaign. My name, for example, doesn’t even appear on Dan Gillmor’s blog, so I’m sure readers were confused who or what you were talking about there …
Comment by TDavid — April 11, 2005 @ 7:31 pm PST
Posted my response on my site. I have to say that the canned response amuses me. Like you pointed out, it’s a damage control forum, not a true request for feedback.
Comment by darkmoon — April 12, 2005 @ 6:07 am PST
GetLocalNews Responds…
Usual disclaimer of Greensboro101 Board, opinion is own, yadda yadda… Here is the point made clearly about citizen journalism by TDavid of MakesYouGoHmm: The original press release style comment response isI think Dan Gillmor, who left a great writin…
Trackback by LUX.ET.UMBRA — April 12, 2005 @ 6:22 am PST
Giving citizen journalists a cut
So while this is interesting news, it’s hardly stuff to write home about. It’s more likely an illustration of the “fame vs. fortune” problem that comes with a glut of publishing power held by the masses.
Trackback by Common Sense Journalism — April 19, 2005 @ 9:15 pm PST