SmartNews hoping to put the ’smart’ into small papers
If you think resources are tight at large and mid-size dailies, just ask the folks at tiny dailies and weeklies. Even places you thought didn’t have enough belt to tighten have tightened their belts.
In steps SmartNewsroom, a new venture from the folks at SmartNews, a free weekly tab in Fayetteville, N.C.
The idea: What if there were a content service — with stories, photos, graphics — that served these micro-papers and charged only micro-fees? Small papers throughout the country might really take advantage of a resource like that.
And, naturally, if enough newspapers bought that content, it could possibly make it worth the effort for the writers, photographers and artists who offer their work.
Small fees x lots of tiny papers out there = decent money.
Sounds like a great idea. SmartNews publisher Randy Foster and managing editor Jim McBee have been working on a way to make this happen.
SmartNews’ Jim McBee
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They’re ready to begin testing. They have their beta site up – Jim points out that it’s just a framework now; it’ll fill in as they acquire content.
What they need, obviously, is some content to start out with.
Jim writes:
For our beta version, we’d like to have 30 really good freelancers from a broad spectrum — news, sports, features, biz, opinion; writing, photography, illustration, page design and graphics; investigative, spot coverage, human interest; traditional and alternative.
We have a handful of folks lined up, but I need your help finding more freelancers to help us roll this thing out. I bet you know someone who’s been laid off, or recently taken a buyout, or who’s just decided to get out of the rotten newspaper game — but who still has a passion for journalism. Or you may know people who already make a living or part of one selling stories, photos, illustrations to whoever’s buying. This site is for them.
Please pass this note along to anyone you know who freelances. Our plan is to get seriously cranking this summer.
Here’s some boilerplate on SmartNewsroom:
What is SmartNewsroom?
SNR is a Web business where freelancers upload content and publishers buy it.
Publications buy only what they need; journalists have control over their products and get a little (maybe even a lot of) extra money — and continue to pursue their crafts. Editors and freelancers stop spending valuable time recruiting prospects and focus on what they’re good at: journalism and publishing.
Why write/shoot/draw on spec?
First, the smart thing to do is repurpose work you’ve already sold, but not exclusively.
Second, sometimes the news won’t wait for you to make a deal.
Third, instead of freelancers pitching story ideas, or editors hunting freelancers to cover stories, let the freelancers get on with writing, shooting, drawing and designing; let editors get on with editing and publishing.
How does this work?
A publication only pays a tiny price for each story, photo, graphic or page; you make money by selling to many publications.
Each time a publication buys your work, they’re required to rate it before they buy anything else. Your rating is the average of all your previous story-ratings, and the price of your content is your rating multiplied by the size of publication making the purchase.
You get every penny from the purchase, and you get paid when your account reaches $100.
Sounds really interesting, Jim. This is just the sort of thing that would really help some of the small papers who sent folks to my recent sessions in Cary, N.C. and in Dallas.
If you’re interested — either as a contributor or as a customer — please follow the links and contact Jim right away.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 am
It sounds nice in theory, but my concern is this: The model seems to operate on the assumption that it will be worthwhile for freelance journalists to sell a piece of work for $1 to $5 a download because the number of papers buying that piece of work will offset the low per-unit cost. That model may work for low-cost stock photo sites like istockphoto.com, but news content is very different from stock photos.
For one, there is a much bigger limit on how much existing work you can repurpose and how long that work has value. A stock photo of an apple has the same usefulness today as it would 10 years from today, whereas most news stories/photos/graphics would be all but useless after just a couple days.
Also, if this site’s clientèle is micro-dailies or weeklies, don’t most of those papers’ content tend to be intensely local? That being the case, won’t it severely limit the number of papers that would want a particular story/graphic/photo that a freelancer from some other part of country, or even from the same the region, produces? If I go and cover an event in Durham, N.C., short of it being a visit by a presidential candidate, how many micro-dailies or weeklies would have an interest in it, even in the state of North Carolina? Even if I were covering the state capitol and churning out a story every day that papers in the region would be interested in — serving as a pool reporter, per se, for micro-dailies — I would still need 10 papers to buy it every day to make $50 a day. ($50 a day) x (5 days a week) x (52 weeks) = $13,000 a year — not very much for the time you would have to invest to produce work good enough, deep enough, and wide-ranging enough that a large number of papers would buy from you every day. The only situation in which I can see this working would be for freelancers with established reputations covering national news in huge markets like New York or Washington, in which case they probably aren’t hurting for work anyway and can probably score regular gigs that pay a lot more than what they can by selling the story for $5 a pop. Scale it down to the arena that small dailies play in, and the incentive just isn’t there for a journalist to do this.
I really am not trying to poop on this experiment before it starts (in fact I have some old graphics I won’t mind throwing up there to see what happens), but I think those things I listed are very legitimate questions/concerns. Right now, from what I can tell, small newspapers have a lot of incentive to participate, but not the content-suppliers. It looks like any money a freelancer gets from this site would be purely gravy rather than something that can be counted on as a reliable source of income. That may work ok for a cheap stock photo site, where I can walk outside and snap a photo of the sky in 30 seconds and if no one buys it, all I lost was 30 seconds, but it doesn’t work if it’s trying to be a means for freelance journalists to make a consistent living because every piece they put on there would require a lot more time to produce. If this site only sends you a check when your account reaches $100, you might have to wait a long time for payday.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
We’ve been thinking about all those things, too, John. The only way to gauge the market is to test it, which is what we’re doing. Just in a very quick glance at press association listings, there are thousands and thousands of newspapers in the U.S. Not to mention city and state magazines, alt weeklies, arts and entertainment pubs, college papers and so on.
As for making a living versus gravy, I think the idea is some money is better than none. Not everyone who freelances does it full time.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Jim, I certainly applaud you guys for trying something new (in fact I just signed up as one of your beta testers). I’m just concerned that most content-providers would see little reason to participate because of how many purchases of one piece of work it would take to just cover the time spent producing it, and the likelihood of that happening seems low, given the geographic and timeliness factors. I think sites like istockphoto.com works in part b/c a lot of those photos don’t take a lot of time to produce, or they could be something that was done more for recreation than for pay. If I can pursue my hobby and make a couple bucks from it, why not? But no one covers city hall or writes sports features as a hobby, so if somebody takes the time to do something like that, they are looking to get paid (and not just a couple bucks either, considering how much time it takes). Without guaranteed, equitable compensation for their efforts, I doubt most journalists would see this as worthwhile.
One other concern: What real incentives do the papers have for giving a piece a good rating, since higher ratings will make future work from that provider more expensive? The content-providers can’t dictate whom to sell to or not sell to, so they can’t cut off papers that give them low ratings. The only thing they can do is to stop contributing, in which case the paper still has less to lose, since the chances are usually slim that it would use something else from the same freelancer again. The freelancers would lose more since they won’t have any business if they stop contributing. Again, the model seems unbalanced in favor of the buyer. Perhaps you should consider a cost scale based on how many times a provider’s work has been downloaded compared to the site average. That takes subjective opinion and shenanigans out of play.
I definitely do like the idea of a “marketplace” where journalists can sell their services. But I think it might work better along the lines of a guru.com model, where newspapers post projects and request bids, and freelancers could propose projects and see how many papers would be interested in acquiring the product, so they would know if it’s worthwhile before investing time and effort into it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I’m glad to see the wheels turning, John. That’s why we need folks like you to help us figure this thing out. I agree that SNR probably won’t engender a whole lot of freelance city-hall coverage. But there could be room for someone who otherwise blogs about a specialty, or someone with entertainment connections, or a sports reporter with access to famous jocks, or ….
The heart of the concept is for freelancers to resell stories they haven’t sold exclusive rights to.
And we will allow providers to “blacklist” publications if they feel they’ve gotten a raw deal on ratings, just as we will allow them to black out publications that may be in a region affected by a non-compete agreement.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I’ve passed this along to my friends in Lake Tahoe who have a large circle of tiny Swift papers and some freelancers I know who might play along. Also got a ton of little papers in Reno. States like this have good potential with only twomajor newspapers in the whole of Nevada.
I wonder if what you guys are/can be experimenting with is citizen journalism here too. This would be an interesting way to encourage that aspect of the journalism experiment. I’d say it’ll take this a year to take off if you do it right. It has great potential, market it with some other partners.
Hell, even city papers could take content from colleges due to larger paper’s lack of university coverage (guessing of course the college paper has worthwhile or good content to use). But if so, think of the great supplement to college paper’s banks and city paper’s pages (not to mention a beat reporter). Now that’s something I can dig on. I’ll bring it up with “my people.”
I’d ask the same questions as John but I see he beat me to it. Should be fun!