Revenue Streams for Journalists

As many more journalists seek to create their own newsrooms, whether online or cross-platform, the keep-you-up-at-night question remains the same. Who is going to pay us?  How do we sustain these ventures? (I have written here at LR  about my own Journalism start-ups, including InvestigateNY.) Over the weekend, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting [...]

A summary of the Block by Block summit

The Block by Block Conference in Chicago attracted over 100 local site owners, foundations, academics and others whose livelihoods and/or obsessions revolve around on-line local news operations and how to sustain them.

Because this conference is organized as more of an on-going conversation groups than of podium lectures, I thought it might be useful to put some of those threads and insights into bite sized pieces (click through below for full coverage):

Speed dating for site owners at Block by Block

The  Block by Block Conference (bxb) for hyperlocal news sites begins Thursday in Chicago, and already conference co-host Michele McLellan has an assignment for many of the 125 site-owners and others in attendance: “In the space of about 40 minutes,  she writes, “we want each of you to stand up and say a few words. Very, [...]

Skip-ipedia, pt. 2

As a follow-up to our Monday post on the limits of Wikipedia, please consider the following. This list is compiled by an historian in my area: Below is a list of  about 50 articles that have been cataloged as having been deleted without cause from Wikipedia. It also includes some articles that still remain but [...]

Skip-ipedia

Arguably the most profound result of the growth of the internet, and by extension, that of on-line journalism, is our ability to immediately connect to any “whats” or “whos” that we seek.  And more and more often, the availability all of this information comes courtesy of collaborations, such as Crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe apparently coined that [...]

Patch Dispatch

Today they are standing on every corner in one town outside New York City. They are blonde, female and clearly under 25. They wear bright green T-shirts and visors that say “Patch,” and they hand out pens and stickers and leaflets by the gross. They do not live here.

“Have you read Patch?” they croon to the commuters and shoppers and mommies with strollers, many of whom stare straight ahead without stopping.

These are the new Journalists. At least they say they are.

Patch, or “Poach,” as someone here at Lost Remote once called it, is the network of identical hyperlocal sites that AOL is rolling out at a reported cost of well over $50 million this year.

In fact, the sites are parachuting down so fast they can’t even keep up with the list of “coming” sites on the Patch homepage; the town where we spotted the lovelies today isn’t even on the list yet, but they are advertising for writers on Craigslist.