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!

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.

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.

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.