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I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now);
by lsanger 12y ago
I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how).
We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...
- sparkzilla 12y agoThanks Larry. I think breaking down the info into bits is interesting, it's something we have been looking into for other parts of our site (not news). BTW, weren't you paid to create the first 1000 or so Wikipedia articles?
- lsanger 12y agoI was Wikipedia's co-founder and first and so far only community manager/chief instigator. I did contribute a bunch of articles, don't know how many, while in that position. I wasn't paid per article. If you don't pay people, you have to compensate them in other ways--especially in terms of community recognition and other evidence of the value of their work to the community/readership as a whole.
- tyang 12y agoAre you at 1000 articles? How's your burn rate?
- sparkzilla 12y agoOur writers have added almost 25,000 posts on thousands of topics (a sample here http://newslines.org http://newslines.org). So far, at $1 a post, that has cost $25,000. Some of our writers have made thousands of dollars. We just closed more investment are are building a revenue-share model that will give our writers even more money. People who get in early, and do consistent work will be able to make a lot of money.
- tyang 12y agoCool stuff. Best of luck to you.
- lsanger 12y agoYes, may the best model win!
- sparkzilla 12y agoThere's plenty of room for everyone. Best of luck.