Charles Apple

We wanted to post a reminder late this week about the exciting SmartNews co-op designed to bring free-lancers together with publishers of small — and perhaps not-so-small — newspapers. We wrote about it at length last week.

But we spent all our time Wednesday blogging news and tweaking our slideshow for today. So instead, we thought we’d hand over the blog to our good friend Jim McBee, the managing editor of SmartNews.

Take it away, Jimbo…

If you’re an editor or publisher who’s under the gun to cut costs (nah, none of those around), it’s time to check us out. Not because we’re going to save you $100,000 a year right away, but because Smartnews is a medium-term strategy to lower costs while we brave this brutal storm of technological change, ridiculous debt, and just plain old recession. We’re an experiment that’s worth trying out.

Publications have slashed their staffs. Even with cuts in news hole, publishers still need good “stuff to fill in around the ads.” And that’s where Smartnews comes in.

We’re starting to get a pretty good batch of contributors (25+ and we hear from more each day at Smartnews). Now it’s time to make some sales.

1. We’re cheaper than wire. If you’re a small publication (fewer than 100,000 impressions a week), your cost for content will be $1.20-$6 per item. A payment matrix crosses an author’s rating against the circulation of the publication. Go back and compare that to your wires and syndicated content. You start with as little as $120 to get your feet wet.
2. You buy everything a la carte. You don’t have to subscribe to a bunch of stuff you’ll never use in order to get the handful of things you will. A wire service or syndicated package is kind of like cable TV — you buy a bunch of channels you’ll never watch in order to get ESPN. We understand why people play that game, but we’re going to let the market sort out what pays and what’s niche.
3. You can sell as well as buy. With a wire service, if you contribute content, you don’t see a dime — even if half the newspapers in the country run it. At Smartnews, your content’s just as valuable as anyone else’s. And you’re not competing against our staff writers and photographers, because we don’t have any. If I want to upload something I’ve written or designed, I’m just the same as any other freelancer.
4. We’ve got quality. We’re not talking about a bunch of hacks, here. Newspapers have laid off some of their best and brightest, and we’re snapping them up as fast as we can.

We go live on April 1. What better way to enjoy April Fools’ Day than to start a news venture during a recession?

Thanks, Jim.

Find the SmartNews web site here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:51 am and is filed under Free-lance, Innovative ideas, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.