Read the whole thing!
I went to the Middle East for six months so I could expand my freelance writing portfolio. But I found, after a few months, there may be a better way forward than publishing disconnected dispatches here and there for low pay.
The mainstream media is an industry in decline. The audience shrinks every year. Profits circle the drain. Budgets for foreign bureaus and correspondents have been gutted stem to stern. Most journalists are paid pitifully low salaries even in good times, and freelancers are paid even worse. Striving to become a part of all that may not be the brightest idea if there’s another option.
And it looks like there might be.
I decided to try a little experiment. Instead of lining up an assignment from an editor to cover Northern Iraqi Kurdistan, I struck out on my own without asking permission from anyone. Almost all my material was posted directly to this Web site. I wanted to see if the amount of money I can raise from readers competes with the industry’s going rate.
It does.
I love the concept behind this -- paying directly for news coverage in areas and/or on topics that might not otherwise get covered. It opens up a whole new market for journalism and allows people to support the reporters they like directly rather than supporting a newspaper or news program that happens to have a reporter you like on their staff.
I don't see this method completely replacing traditional mainstream media, but it is a welcome innovation and adds good competition on the margin.
Chalk another one up for the blogosphere and calk one up for Mr. Totten! Very well done!
Hattip Instapundit.
No comments:
Post a Comment