Charles Apple

Randy Foster and Jim McBee are launching a new cooperative to help match up free-lance writers, photographers, artists and designers with newspapers that need help while their in-house resources are diminishing.

Randy Foster and Jim McBee of SmartNews.
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It’s called SmartNews. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Randy and Jim used it for a tabloid that published for about a year in Fayetteville, N.C. Those of you who have seen my slideshows have seen a number of old SmartNews pages.

They first pitched this co-op idea — and we covered it — last year. They’ll be ready to launch on April 1, they say.

We’re convinced this could be a great help to small newspapers around the country. Along with 22 other journalists, so far, we’ve signed up to contribute content. Randy’s hoping for another seven to sign up this week to give him an even 30 when he begins his pitch to newspaper publishers.

SmartNews‘ members will post their articles, photos, graphics and whatnot to a bulletin board-type web page. They’ll be paid via micropayments, Randy says:

A creator (writer, photographer, artist) posts an item that sells for, say, $3 per download. That’s the base rate that small publications pay if that journalist has a rating of 3.

Medium publications pay $6 to download that same item. Large publications pay $12.

Let’s say 30 publications buy limited use of that item (they can use it only once) — 12 small, 4 medium and 4 large.

12 x 3 is $36 from small pubs; 4 x 6 is $24 from medium pubs; and 4 times 12 is $48 from large pubs. Total income from that round of downloads is $108.

I’ve been browsing the freelance sites and see them paying $15 to $80 for articles. Small to medium newspapers seldom pay more than $50 for a freelanced piece. It is uncommon (not unheard of, but uncommon) for freelancers to sell a piece to more than one publication.

If you write a great weekly column, you may find yourself in great demand and make a pretty decent living. If you cover a big news story, your piece may wind up getting lots of downloads. It’s a matter of picking and choosing your efforts wisely.

As my friend and colleague has said, SmartNews needs a good number of members — both creators and publishers — to work.

Sounds like a really good concept. We’re glad to pitch in.

Find the SmartNews web site — and learn more about the project — here. For those of you on Facebook, Randy created a SmartNews group that currently has 116 members. Randy has been sending out daily memos that explain how he sees SmartNews working and keeps folks posted on where he is in the setup process.

In addition, Jim has been hitting the subject pretty frequently in his own blog. Check it out here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Free-lance, Innovative ideas, Resources, Small papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.