Re-evaluating HuffPo’s unpaid bloggers
On his Mixed Media blog at Forbes.com, Jeff Bercovici offers a new angle to consider in the recent lawsuit that unpaid writers have brought against the Huffington Post and AOL. Bercovici starts off by acknowledging that, in terms of ad revenue, US$105 million is too high a value for the bloggers’ work, but he builds […]
St. Joseph Media keeps mum about Torontoist plans
By Ian Harvey Three weeks after the announcement Torontoist had got hitched to St. Joseph Media, there’s a cone of silence on what the future holds for the newlyweds. Attempts by Story Board to interview the principals involved, Torontoist publisher Ken Hunt and St. Joe’s president Doug Knight, received short email responses or were ignored […]
Asking Arianna for change
Open letters to publications’ management are a last-ditch tactic to right wrongs and spur change—but as we’ve seen recently, they can be effective. Now, adding his voice to many others asking the Huffington Post to reconsider its approach to compensating writers, comes Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild-CWA, with an open letter to Arianna […]
CWG’s Derek Finkle on Nino Ricci’s letter to the Globe
We asked Derek Finkle, founder of the Canadian Writers Group, which represents independent writers, about typical compensation for freelance travel writing and whether it’s common for dailies to leave an invoice unpaid for six months, as the Globe did in Ricci’s case.
Toronto Standard aims to give web writers a fair shake
Launching April 7, Toronto Standard will join an already crowded field of sites presenting Toronto news. But rather than follow the recent trend of focusing on the hyper-local, the site plans to look outward, editorial director Christopher Frey—founding editor of Outpost Magazine and a writer represented by Canadian Writers Group—told Torontoist. A few writers have […]
Newspaper Guild-CWA advocating on behalf of unpaid HuffPo writers
Poynter.org has posted a press release from the Newspaper Guild-CWA in which it asks writers who contribute work to the Huffington Post for free to cease doing so until the company agrees to start compensating them. The Guild’s request follows the Huffington’s Post‘s recent $350 million buyout by AOL, and it’s not the first call […]
Not all news jobs are created equal
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its own words, a “a nonpartisan ‘fact tank,'” released its State of the Media Report for 2011, an attempt to evaluate the robustness of media in the U.S.
La Presse to go digital-only
In the face of declining print subscriptions and optimistic praise for digital publications such as The Daily, Montreal daily La Presse has announced it intends to move to an online-only format within three to five years. It will be the first major daily newspaper to carry out such a transition. As part of its multi-million-dollar […]
Longing for long form
As it gets tougher and tougher for journalists to successfully pitch long-form pieces to traditional publications — without mostly writing them first — other options are opening up.
“Web 3.0 is the era of experts — not writers”
The above quote is from CEO Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.com, a “learn anything” site that repurposes content from around the web. When he began his venture, he reportedly said that the site wasn’t reliant on Google, and that he could build a loyal base of visitors without it.
