Comments on: Wanted: Experienced, passionate citizens for hyperlocal sites: Earn $$$ from your home!

By: Alex Barner

Alex Barner — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:02:59 +0000

A High-Yield Online Investment Program (HYIP) is a type of Pyramid Scheme. HYIPs typically accept deposits as low as $1 while promising astoundingly high returns. Online HYIP schemes rarely last for more than a couple of years. As a result of online forums and monitoring sites which have made HYIP investors more aware of their nature, a different sort of "honest" HYIP began springing up in the early months of 2006. Basically, the HYIP owner calls his or her program a "ponzi-structured game" where one should "not invest money one cannot afford to lose", and where there is "never a guarantee of earnings or refunds". They promise to pay out up to (for example) 95% of deposits, the rest going to hosting or other fees and the owner's profit.

By: Tom Abate

Tom Abate — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:28:03 +0000

Thank you for an encouraging yet level-headed look at the economics of hyperlocal journalism. If you prepared a spreadsheet in the course of your analysis and are willing to share it (how?) that would be a great assist for anyone who would like to perform a similar analysis of the hyperlocal economics of their own area. Also, I know the Borrell people are good about sending out executive summaries but must sell the full reports. Are you able to share a full copy of an old report so we can see the raw data from whence you extracted your base numbers? That, too, would be educational. In any event thank you what you have already done to get the discussion down to business.

By: Danish Manzoor

Danish Manzoor — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:34:07 +0000

Well As If u Need any thing from Jammu & Kashmir INDIA…I M always here:-)

By: Steve Crozier

Steve Crozier — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:41:39 +0000

Tom, you just about perfectly describe the model that we’ve arrived at, at Black White Read online community newspapers. I’d like to say that we crafted it carefully in advance, but it just happened.

As we started publishing, citizen-readers started saying, “hey, I’d like to write for you.” We’ve now got 10-12 contributors (writers and photographers) who contribute 1-8 stories/month. We pay them by the story, usually around $50.

The demographic is *exactly* as you described it: stay-at-home moms, retirees, and people employed full-time who want some extra cash.

Actually, there’s one more category: people who want to get their writing or photography published to build a portfolio; we’ve already had one young man whose efforts for us resulted in his being appointed to a student advisory board at our city newspaper.

There are other elements to our model, but you pretty much nailed it. (If you’d like to see our first publication, check out Lakewood-Now.)

I believe that this model can work. Our biggest obstacle is convincing advertisers to carve out a piece of their ad budget for online. We’re going to have to be persistent.

By: Tom Grubisich

Tom Grubisich — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:38:54 +0000

I acknowledge that in the commentary, and suggest a publisher or content manager might work for less than a competitive salary if total compensation included stock options. When I co-founded a chain of weekly papers in Northern Virginia, my salary — when it was actually paid — was about half of what I had earned at my previous job as a reporter at the WPost. Entrepreneurs can’t and shouldn’t expect to be paid competitive salaries. They’re rolling the dice.

By: Roxanne Cooper

Roxanne Cooper — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:16:07 +0000

True. But I was commenting on your expense budget for NON-EDITORIAL positions. I think you’ll find it difficult to hire accomplished/talented publishers, sales reps and tech employees at your budget. Especially in THOSE markets.

By: Tom Grubisich

Tom Grubisich — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:03:54 +0000

Stipends are not the same as competitive salaries. I was paid $200 for the last op-ed I wrote for the Washington Post (in May). Based on the time I put in reporting and writing the piece, that worked out to less than $15 an hour, considerably less than I think hyperlocal grassroots journalists should be paid. The average hyperlocal operation is micron sized compared to the Post, whose parent company’s profits were $283 million in 2006. Go figure.

By: Roxanne Cooper

Roxanne Cooper — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:24:06 +0000

Your budget greatly underestimates what talented and experienced non-editorial folk earn in Washington, D.C., Northwest Chicago and the Bay Area.

By: Tom Grubisich

Tom Grubisich — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:06:32 +0000

I should have been clearer that the $1,000 monthly stipend would be for steady, productive contributors, not occasional ones. Each site would need about three such regulars, I estimate. Perhaps one of the regulars could spend part of his/her time helping the content manager build the homepage, where the best stuff would be showcased and updated at least daily. One of them might blog around a subject that’s of special interest in the community (growth and development, recreation, local history).

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:24:46 +0000

Tom, your suggestion to pay citizen journalists a $1,000 a month stipend is amazingly generous! Out where I am, the local mainstream paper and the alternative press (which actually owned by a large publisher) pay their “citizen journalists” somewhere around the $25 – $50 a month range. In these operations, the citizen journalists are all hand-picked by the editorial staff–the positions never advertised. It is as if activists you’re talking about were actually discouraged from being part of the citizen journalism efforts of these established organizations.

We do not need citizen journalism that is controlled by the established press. We need challenges to the status quo.

Citizen journalism needs more entrepreneurs who can put out a voice different from whatever constitutes the journalism establishment–just so various areas can have a different viewpoint on issues that are important to them. But how many can do that are there? We talk about money–that’s definitely a big issue–but in some instances it may take a boatload of chutzpah to get out there and challenge the status quo. Can we put a price on chuzpah? who knows…