Interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor on the concept of journalism “crowdsourcing”:
Mayhill Fowler wrote a significant Web-only political story this week that took the temperature of the Democratic electorate. More remarkable than her conclusion – that Democrats are more undecided and less Iraq-focused than polls suggest – is the whopping 17 reporters in nine states who filed on-the-ground accounts to contribute to it.The cornucopia of contributors, surpassing what most news outlets could ever afford, cost virtually nothing. That’s because the reporters are volunteers, including Ms. Fowler, a Californian, who at age 60 has embraced beat reporting on Barack Obama.
“I looked through all the information that people sent in and I came up with what I thought were the significant things we discovered in these 14 cities on Saturday,” she says. Her story was published online by Off the Bus, a project boasting 1,500 citizen journalists and affiliation with The Huffington Post, a liberal website.
“Until [this] post, there’s nothing really on the Obama campaign that I think we’ve brought that the mainstream media can’t. It’s this kind of joint effort that really is the thing,” she adds.
Collaborative citizen-reporting projects like this one are sprouting across the political landscape of Election 2008. Thousands of volunteers are adding muscle to efforts by professional reporters and campaign staff to leave no stone unturned – and no skeletons in the closet. But to drive volunteer interest, many of these “crowdsourcing” efforts draw more energy from partisan fervor than traditional journalism’s impartiality, say experts.
Read the rest.
Here’s the list of the Top 10 newspaper Web sites, according to the Bivings Group:
1.) The New York Times
2.) The Washington Post
3.) USA Today
4.) Houston Chronicle
5.) The Denver Post
6.) The Knoxville News Sentinel
7.) The Fresno Bee
8.) Austin American-Statesman
9.) The (Nashville) Tennessean
10.) San Jose Mercury News
Not sure who the Bivings Group is — but they make great Top 10 lists.
The name reminds me of the Bivans Brothers, a guitar duo that played Greenville, N.C., back in the early 90s. Ahh, good times.
Not sure what to make of this, but the Wall Street Journal is now offering annual Web subscriptions for $20 a year. Normally that subscription costs $100 per year and the WSJ was noted as the only newspaper in the business that could charge that much for Web-only content.
The WSJ may have reached a ceiling with business-type subscribers who could afford the price because their companies were footing the bill. But will those subscribers still be willing to shell out $100 per year? This seems like a pretty drastic change to their online business model.
When they announced the combination of online and print circulation numbers in 2005, the WSJ reported 764,000 online-only subscribers. Since then, they don’t appear to have broken down online and print circulation figures. Perhaps those online numbers aren’t as impressive as they once were.
