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.

World Entertainment News Network (WENN) to Syndicate Allvoices Celbrity Pics

“Allvoices’ contributor content provides us with a depth of material and access to entertainment photos and videos taken by people with new perspectives on what they’re seeing, as it happens. The result is we’re able to provide our clients with the most compelling shots, videos and in-demand content first, before anyone else. And that’s the name of our game.”

Is Your Post a $100,000 Hit?

Allvoices citizen reporters have the ability to make money from posting breakaway, original reports that will be a Hit and generate a lot of buzz and traffic. The new Hit Incentive only applies to an individual post or report and is only valid for a period of 15 days from the original posting date.

A quick summary of the Hit incentive program is:

Page views	Incentive payment
100,000 plus (within 15 days of posting)	$250
1 Million plus (within 15 days of posting)	$5,000
10 Million plus (within 15 days of posting)	$100,000

 

For more details, please visit http://www.allvoices.com/incentive

The main reason we are offering the Hits program is that we realize that our citizen reporter, you, produce content that generates a lot of buzz, but may not get rewarded for it. For example, the picture of a plane crashing into the Hudson River that had a link posted on Twitter got millions and millions of views, but the poster did not make any money. The women who posted the image said that if she knew of a site that would pay money for her photo, she would have posted it on that site instead.

We at Allvoices want such content from our citizen reporters and we want you to make money if you do post such breakaway content.

Thank you for your support, for evangelizing the site, and for making Allvoices the fastest growing people-generated news network in the world!

Note: There are no changes to the existing Build Your Allvoices Brand Incentive Program, which continues to offer our community opportunities to earn cash rewards for contributing on a consistent basis.

The Allvoices Team

 

Riddle: When are Journalists Citizens?

Answer: Never, if you work for The Washington Post.

The Washington Post unveiled guidelines today restricting its newsroom staff from sharing via social networks their opinions on just. about. anything.  The “Newsroom Guidelines for Use of Facebook, Twitter and Other Online Social Networks” are a virtual radio silence order for anyone in the Post’s newsroom who also participate on the web’s social properties.

Just the facts, please...as you see, hear or speak them

paidContent.org has the full text of the guidelines (with a hat tip to TechCrunch).  Among some activities verboten by the Post if you write for the paper:

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.  Post journalists should not be involved in any social networks related to advocacy or a special interest regarding topics they cover, unless specifically permitted by a supervising editor for reporting and so long as other standards of transparency are maintained while doing any such reporting.

In fact, All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens (direct from the Post’s text).  So, Post journalists never really get to just be citizens.  They can’t have an opinion, or if they do, they can’t share it with anyone.

It’s easy to understand why the paper is going to such lengths to protect the integrity of its content.  It’s ombudsman, in a blog post to the paper’s readership, is refreshingly frank in his explanation that the paper has been fighting a perception problem: “Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage.”

Well of course they do.  The Post’s reporters and editors (in fact, every newspaper’s reporters and editors) are paid to decide for their readers what is and isn’t news; what gets covered, and what doesn’t get ink.  How are those decisions made?  Personal opinion.  The opinions of reporters and editors are used to determine what is and isn’t newsworthy, and opinions are always influenced by personal filters, whether they’re cultural, political or environmental.  So there is always some element of bias at work in determining a newspaper’s content.  Yes, “professional” editors and reporters are good at shutting out their slant, but they can’t completely neutralize themselves.

Another contradiction in the Post’s guidelines: how they can expect their news staff to stop having authentic, human conversations with other connections on the web especially if, on the flip side of this no opinion order, the Post recognizes the importance of social properties for news gathering.  It’s difficult to see how the two can co-exist with one another.  The Post can’t expect its people to make connections for the purpose of gathering information, without giving up a little of themselves.  That’s just not how the web works.

Allvoices offers an unfiltered platform which embraces multiple points of view.  In fact, the more “angles” exposed around a particular story, the more information that story’s readers have with which to formulate their own opinion about the content.  There’s no one editorial source making decisions for readers.

It’s a new model for news which understands people are social beings.  No matter how good an editor is at determining what is and isn’t news, something influences those decisions.  Reporters from any outlet looking for a place to write without fear of being exposed should take a look at Allvoices’ incentive program, which allows anyone to register and write under their own or a screen name, with full privacy protection.

The Twitter News Bureau Launches

There’s no denying the power of Twitter’s immediacy and ability to capture snapshots of news breaking from anywhere, anytime.  It can be powerful stuff. But *usually* those snapshots stand alone and unframed by any useful context, relevancy or even the ability (beyond what’s said in 140 characters) to tell you where the news is from.

just took the wraps off our new system for bringing context and credibility to Twitter, while using Twitter to help allvoices bring more, additional relevant information to its citizen reports, as well as data for allvoices’ “Breaking” and “Popular” tabs.

We’re the only citizen journalism site able to take virtually any data source and integrate it with relevant citizen contributions to the site; Twitter is just an example (albeit an important example) of this ability.

BNET’s David Weir has a nice analysis of our news here

editorsweblog.org also covers us

and Journalism.co.uk writes us up here.

News release below….check out the Twitter feeds on the report pages and please let us know what you think!

ALLVOICES ADDS CONTEXT, CREDIBILITY TO NEWS-RELATED TWITTER DATA

Global Citizen Media Hub Integrates Tweets Related to Breaking and Popular Stories; Creates Enhanced Journalists “LiveStream” for News Addicts

SAN FRANCISCO — September 14, 2009 — Allvoices, Inc. (www.allvoices.com), the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere, today became the only citizen media outlet to integrate live, event- and location-specific Twitter data into its citizen reports.  Live Twitter data assists Allvoices’ comprehensive verification process with vetting stories for authenticity by providing additional context and ranking reports in Allvoices’ “Breaking” and “Popular” categories.  Users now enjoy an enhanced, real-time view of everything happening in the locations, around the events and to the people reported on the site.

Allvoices’ uses a combination of community input and algorithms to vet contributed reports.  As soon as one is submitted, the system “pivots” around the report and immediately pulls related content from mainstream news and user generated sources like videos, blogs and pictures to create a full, 360 degree view of the news. Integrating live tweets makes Allvoices’ ranking system even more real-time, adding context and a comprehensive understanding of circumstances surrounding the event.

Allvoices has leveraged Twitter data in several distinct areas of the site:

· Allvoices displays the latest tweets for locations covering every city, country and regional landing pages created from citizen and mainstream reports  about a location

· For citizen  reports, Allvoices displays tweets related to the report to build a stronger case for the report’s authenticity and credibility, while adding more context to the report itself

· For mainstream news, Allvoices aggregates real-time tweets that discuss the same news to show users what conversations are occurring around those reports.

· Tweets now provide input for Allvoices’ ranking algorithms.  The algorithms determine what shows up at the top of the “Breaking” and “Popular” tabs for each location, city, country and regional landing page. Live tweets add another dimension to Allvoices ability to vet and rank reports, which includes community validation and numerous machine-based heuristics.

· In addition to integrating Twitter’s data into contributed reports, Allvoices has created a separate, unique page which aggregates hundreds reporters’ tweets, along with any stories and events they may relate to on Allvoices.  News “addicts” can find this site at www.allvoices.com\tweets.

A recent study conducted by research firm Pear Analytics found that forty percent of tweets are categorized as “Pointless Babble” (Pear’s term), which is indicative of the difficulty people have finding tweets with real news content.   However recent events, like those just after Iran’s recent election, have shown Twitter to be indispensable for reporting news as it breaks, but lacks situational context, the ability to pinpoint location and in some cases, credibility. Allvoices solves this by vetting Twitter’s information and wrapping it into a news report’s “big picture.”

“We feel Allvoices has broken ground here by pulling the news gems from Twitter’s massive live stream and integrating that specific, relevant content into the reports contributed to our citizen media hub,”  said Dr. Sanjay Sood, chief technical officer, Allvoices.com.  Twitter alone as a source for news doesn’t have the ability to tell a full story.  Allvoices delivers the full story for a report plus a deeper understanding of the conversations going on around that event.  What’s great about the system we’ve built is that it can take virtually any data source and apply it to user-generated and mainstream news reports“

Allvoices is the first citizen media outlet using technology to validate user generated content, the lack of which has been the biggest barrier to the mainstream adoption of citizen media.  Allvoices’ ability to vet user-generated content against mainstream sources, as well as other citizen-generated reports instantly provides validity and a measure of credibility to citizen reports, and gives users a level of comfort when consuming this information.

What a day!

Wow! What a day yesterday was! I spent the day at San Francisco State University meeting students from the Journalism department at a job and internship fair put together by the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism. I met many interesting students… More on that in a moment…

But first…

Incentive Program News!

While I was busy doing the meet and greet thing, two of our top site contributors were busy getting views!

MarcusCato and Roxanne Weber both went over the 100,000 views line in the last day! Roxanne Weber you already know from Meet the community: OnlineBusinessWoman. MarcusCatoyou will be meeting in our next community bio coming in the next day or so. Both are great writers who put together pieces full of good information, pictures, cartoons, and conversation starters. If you aren’t following thier news on allvoices, you should be!

Check them out!

Flip News!

In addition to meeting students and having 2 people go over the 100,000 views mark, we also had another person earn a Flip for referals: paulvalach. Paul is from Avondale, AZ (that’s near Phoenix). He has a couple of good pieces out there – watch for more from him soon. We have a few more users very close to the 20 persons refered level – If you want a Flip from allvoices, you are going to need to get those referals going!

Back to yesterday…

While at the job/internship fair yesterday, I met many interesting students. Some are writers, some are photographers, some do both. Watch for thier news coming soon.

I put the names of the students who stopped to talk to me and registered for the site into a hat. The winner gets a Flip from allvoices so that they can report news on the site. And that winner is…. amanda_elliot

amanda_elliot look for a private message and an email from me soon. The rest of you… Join me in welcoming amanda_elliot to the community and encouraging her to write!

The rest of the world…

While I was heading home from San Francisco last night, this little event called the Presidental Debate happened here in the US. Since I was traveling, I couldn’t see the debate. I will watch it on YouTube, but until I get that chance, I have a challenge for all of you:
Post your take on the debate on the site. Get things going. Let the world know what you think. And if you do, let me know. Who knows, I might even mention your story in one of my blog posts!