Axel Springer Kicking Off News Paywall With iPhone Apps | mocoNews

The fight between web portals, search engines, news “aggregators” and the mainstream media is intensifying by the day.  Just a couple of weeks after News Corp’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch referred to the former method of news delivery as “theft,” come announcements by the publishers of Variety (sorry, Wall Street Journal article behind a paywall), as well as Axel Springer,  that they’ll be instituting paywalls for their content.

Axel Springer Kicking Off News Paywall With iPhone Apps | mocoNews.

While the newspaper business has a legitimate concern over how to be compensated for creating content, restricting access to it doesn’t seem to be the best way to recoup advertising revenue that has migrated online.

Paywalls make it harder to get news from organizations which are already producing less of it,  so it’s a stretch to think such a contradictory business practice will win favor with news consumers.

That’s why it’s as important as ever to cultivate a thriving citizen media environment.  Mainstream outlets are going to be engaged in this battle with online aggregators for the foreseeable future, which will further erode the quality and quantity of their product.  The paywall fight isn’t going to play out behind closed doors, and the result has implications for everyone.  We’ll continue to keep our eye on the story here, and look forward to your thoughts as well.

Allvoices Unveils New Layout and Design!

Today we deployed a new layout and design on Allvoices, and we’ve made the site better, faster and stronger! Our whole team has worked hard and is dedicated to improving the site for our global community. We take feedback from our users very seriously so we can produce the highest quality product to give our community the best experience with our content and platform. Feel free to email feedback or questions to community@allvoices.

We enthusiastically welcome original content and opinion contributions and comments on our site from all our users! Thank you for being a part of our community!

Allvoices: Faster, Better & Stronger!

The last several weeks have been very busy here at Allvoices HQ.  The whole team is working hard and is dedicated to improving the Allvoices experience for our growing and valued global community.

One of our main focuses is making the site as fast as possible.  We are are tuning many areas of the system to make it faster, better, and stronger.  This includes lots of under-the-hood fixes and a revision to the site layout and design.

The new design will be released in the coming weeks.  The new layout will make the experience faster and easier to find the news that matters to you whether it’s local news, latest cellphone contributions or global news shaping the world.  Stay tuned for new developments.

We look forward to seeing your original content and opinion contributions and comments on our site!

allvoices welcomes you!

Welcome to the re-launch of the allvoices blog. I am Kathy Jacobs, the new Community Guru here at allvoices.com  My job? Connect all of you with allvoices. Report problems that you have with the site. Share news about the site and the company. Encourage people to join and report. Advocate allvoices to the world and the world to allvoices.

Nice little job, huh? At the end of my first week, I am already feeling great about the whole thing!

For those of you who don’t know me:

I am a former small business owner. I am a social media geek. I love connecting people with the tools they need, the people that can help them, and the events they need to attend. I am a news hound. I still read the newspaper just about every day, but I also get news from many different online sources. My involvement in newsgroups, user groups, conferences, and social media has brought me here. I believe in making a positive difference. My personal tag line for the last decade has been:

I believe life is meant to be lived. But:
if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived

I think we all need each other to survive. More than that – I think we need to understand each other better in order for the world to survive.

For those of you who don’t know allvoices:

allvoices is citizen media. Our goal is to get you involved in the news. Not just the big things, but all the news that matters to you. We want you to join, to report, and to talk about the news. We want you to share your news directly via the site and via your mobile phone. We are looking for new content. We aren’t looking for copys of things others have reported – if the story has already been reported, we want you to share your take on it.

In the near future, I will be sharing the personal stories of Amra Tareen and Erik Sudelof, the founders of allvoices. Both of them come to citizen media due to news events that affected them personally. Like me, they want to use allvoices to make a difference in the way that people get thier news.