Noteoreous

A shift from free P2P sites like bit torrent sites to commercial sites.

we come back to the gigantic wind-down costs that would entail, getting rid of parts of the operation that aren’t needed anymore. And that’s the problem: much of it isn’t needed anymore. Just ask the many newspapers that are canceling the service along with their $1-million-a-year bills. (See the Star-Ledger that was produced with a single AP pixel.)

Jarvis on link economy, reverse syndication, and why it is so expensive to try and remake old media into new.

Kickstarter is essentially a hub of interactions between creators and their true fans, after all. It removes the barrier between artist and fan (and, more broadly, producer and consumer), creating the possibility for an exchange that’s more fulfilling, efficient, and emotionally resonant than anything mass-production affords us. What mattered more: the quality of In/Rainbows’ music or that Radiohead went directly to true fans (creating new ones in the process) to release it?

It’s a provocative theory that we all want to believe. It sounds so simple, so weirdly doable when all we ever hear is how internet killed the art star and that your iTunes library can and will be held against you in a court of law. There’s no way it could possibly be true, right?

Based on data from the first three months of Kickstarter’s existence, it looks like there’s more than something to it. To date, if a project manages to get to 25% of its funding goal, it has a 94% success rate. Here’s a visual to illustrate that. The X axis represents percentage funded, the Y axis shows the percentage of projects that have reached that

Now you can see why "information is the oil of the 21st century."

In partnership with the organization, Motlagh’s work has appeared in the public broadcasting show, Foreign Exchange, the Frontline’s iWitness webcam program, and the Virginia Quarterly. But it is unlikely that this concept of “reporting first, money maybe later” will continue to allow journalists to make a career out of reporting.

This has, perhaps, been the plight of freelancers for decades, but what is scary is that veteran newsmen and stalwart news organizations are hailing these projects as exemplars of the new journalism model. Motlagh “is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget,” writes David Westphal in the Online Journalism Review.

If the news industry plans to rely on young, ambitious journalists eager enough to make a career so as to pay for their own breakthrough stories, where will subsequent stories come from? While journalists like Motlagh and Hoshaw should rightly be lauded for their determination and passion, this is simply not a sustainable model. Media scholars should be talking about workable ways to fund these projects and urging mainstream news organizations to get behind them, instead of making the case that this is the future of journalism.

This is a model I think is the future, not just of journalism and reporting, but of most work in the 21st century. What is left out at the historical moment of 2009, is health insurance and social benefits. If the US can work out a way to protect its citizens health and to keep our economy from becoming distorted by the for-profit health industry, I think people working for themselves, and forming cooperatives, will be a viable model for many, many culture and communication workers.

A quickie explaning posterous, and noting they don't have an office. I am using posterous.com to make this entry on my WP blog.

As newspaper advertising revenue declines and technology drastically changes the public’s relationship with news organizations, The Times is searching for new streams of money and opening itself to partnerships and arrangements far from the old model, in which editors decide what news is, assign their own reporters and pay the expenses — all of it supported by hundreds and hundreds of advertisers, none big enough to influence the journalism in any way.

The new relationships come in many shapes and sizes. The Times let Hoshaw use its name in her fund-raising pitch. It has published stories in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting unit founded by billionaire bankers. Times executives and editors have even discussed seeking foundation support to underwrite sections of the paper or categories of news, like Science Times, though Catherine Mathis, the company’s spokeswoman, said no foundations had been approached.

NYTimes public editor, Hoskins, talks about NYTimes and a reporter who pitched a story on spot.us, as well as how Pro-Publica and NYTimes work together.

Good examples of hybrid pay/subscribe/free models

They support the new microformats for Value Added News

I call myself “Investigative Communications, LLC”.  It’s a fancy way of saying “investigative reporter for rent.” I’ll look stuff up, I’ll find stuff out, I’ll write it up if you want it. 

One of his early clients was an attorney representing someone who had gotten bilked in a real estate scam.  Rooting through public records on a case like that wasn’t far removed what he had been doing as a journalist for years.  Still, it isn’t the same.