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.
Recent Comments