CrowdNe.ws

Press: A la carte journalism: can CrowdNe.ws be the iTunes of articles?

Susan Johnston has written a terrific article about CrowdNe.ws in Ebyline’s The News Hook. Johnston writes: 

The startup approach

One experiment in a la carte journalism wants to be just that, the iTunes of news. Salem, Mass.-based CrowdNe.ws is now in beta and offers a marketplace for journalists to sell directly to readers on a per-article basis. “We are flooded with so much information that we don’t really want or need,” says CrowdNe.ws founder and CEO J. Michael Wheeler. “I spend a lot of time on my RSS feeds saying ‘No, I don’t want to read that.’ People do that in traditional media. You open up The New York Times and thumb through 5-6 pages before you pick a story to read.”

Wheeler is a serial entrepreneur who taught the first multimedia course at Parsons Paris School of Art and Design in the mid-1990s. The fledgling site’s prototype includes an essay written by current freelancer and former Inc. magazine contributor Alessandra Bianchi and is available for whatever readers want to pay via PayPal.

The term a la carte journalism is a great descriptor. Our model empowers our news audience to buy just the news they want directly from the journalists they support. 

Does that mean that news should be thought of as isolated bits of content? Not at all. News itself isn’t a la carte, to be seen in isolation, but is in fact part of a stream of news, an ecosystem of news. 

That’s what we’re building at CrowdNe.ws.

Johnston's full article is available at A la carte journalism: can CrowdNe.ws be the iTunes of articles? Ebyline’s The News Hook, Conversation about the future of media.

The Distance to Mars

One of the exciting things I've explored over the last 20 years is how technology changes the way we tell Story. That's story with a capital S.

In the 90's there was tremendous excitement about telling stories with multimedia and the web and CD ROMs. Interactive storytelling, collaborative storytelling, multimedia storytelling, interactive literature. The ideas were great and they just kept coming.

But unfortunately, the technology wasn't there yet.

And then the bubble burst.

By the time the technology was robust enough for all of those ideas, the internet and web sites had be pretty much been corproratized. They became sales & marketing tools. The excitement of actually telling stories differently with this exciting new medium kind of slinked off into a corner.

But I see signs that the exploration is back! 

What's the distance to Mars? Here's an exciting new way to tell that story.

Journalists, writers, storytellers: it's time to EXPLORE again! 

From Tower to Table: Tower Garden Redefines Concept of Eating Locally

Alessandra Bianchi writes on the CrowdNe.ws Prototype:

This story looks at an innovative new gardening concept that is a modern-day twist on ancient technology supposedly used in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It's called Vertical Gardening, and produces fruits and vegetables that grow in half the time, requiring just 10% of the water, nutrients, and real estate used by conventional soil gardening. Even better: no dirt, weeds, tilling, kneeling, or weeding required!

From Tower to Table: Tower Garden Redefines Concept of Eating Locally

As a journalist, my role is to learn things and then share them with you, the audience. The digital age we're now in demands a new way of doing that and traditional media is having a difficult time figuring out how. Traditional journalism is in trouble.

But journalism is important, and so I'm participating in a private beta test with a startup called CrowdNe.ws. CrowdNe.ws is working on a new way for me to report the news, and for you to get it. We're testing out a small prototype now. I'm publishing some stories on CrowdNe.ws and I hope you'll take a look at them and participate in our beta test too.

 

Infrastructures or Journalists

At CrowdNe.ws we believe there's something in the DNA of journalists that compels them to find out things and then share what they've learned with others.

We believe finding out things and sharing that information is the heart of journalism. Everything else is the how.

And our digital age demands a new way of doing the how.

Industrial-age media is in trouble; they're having a hard time adapting to the new ways of doing things. What made them great in the 19th-century is what's holding them back in the 21st. Huge and costly infrastructures, printing plants, distribution centers, forests of paper, 20th-century radio/television empires, the advertising model. Especially the advertising model. 

A. J. Liebling, one of the great journalists of the 20th-century said, "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." News media is a distribution vehicle. It's the journalist that reports the news.

So, today, in this digital age, let's connect the news audience directly to their journalists. Let's enable the news audience to support their journalists, rather than supporting 19th-century infrastructures.

Here at CrowdNe.ws we're building a news service for the 21st-century. It will connect the news audience directly to their journalists and their work. It will enable the news audience to support those journalists directly.

Quality journalism is important. Nineteenth-century infrastructures? Not so much.

Le Journal de la Photographie

Jan Innes Radwan isn’t a journalist herself, but she seems to be surrounded by journalists and many-things-journalistic. She sent me an interesting online resource the other day, Le Journal de la Photographie. It’s based in Paris and is published in both English and French.

Born from a dream and from our assessment that in the current new medias no one was covering photography in its entire extent, our Lettre shares and informs daily on the events in the world of photography.

The web site is deemed free and all the featured contents are free to the viewers, without any previous engagement from them. The web site covers entirely all the current events in the world of photography, with the exception of the technical aspects.

Available in English and French, L Journal is featured in the form of a “newsletter”, a web site and an iPad application to all audiences interested in photography

Le Journal de la Photographie launched its first version in October 2010. Since then, we have been covering daily information on photography.

Check it out.

Helicopter Mom's Essay

Alessandra Bianchi writes on CrowdNe.ws:

“Mom, can I help you with anything?”

Like many questions coming from my 14-year-old son these days, this brought tears to my eyes, on an otherwise ho-hum Saturday afternoon.

Two days ago, an oversized FedEx envelope arrived on our doorstep announcing his acceptance to a top tier boarding school he had decided was his number-one choice.

I have not been the same since.

Her essay "Memo to Helicopter Mom: You're Grounded" is now available at the CrowdNe.ws prototype.

CrowdNe.ws is rebooting the news. This CrowdNe.ws prototype is one of a series of experiments that will inform the CrowdNe.ws platform.