Churnalism.com: A Writer’s Best Friend?
Google’s recent announcement that it is cracking down on “content farming” was bad news for media outlets producing low-quality regurgitated or repackaged stories.
Further scrutiny now comes in the form of Churnalism.com, a website that asks users to paste press releases into a search engine, which then compares the text with as many as three million news stories and determines how much of their text has been lifted directly from the release.
WaPo gets excited about aggregating news, but who’s getting paid?
The Washington Post Co. has reportedly invested between $5 and $10 million in developing Trove, a free personalized aggregation service that will collect news from 10,000 sources online. WaPo’s senior vice president and chief digital officer, Vijay Ravindran, says it “probably won’t save journalism on its own, but it’s a start.”
Paid surfing coming to NYTimes.com
The Wall Street Journal online is reporting that the New York Times is planning to launch a paid subscription system, likely next month, for online content. The system will allow casual surfers a certain amount of free content and targets instead the 15% of “heavy users” for a monthly sub fee. Right now, according to […]
Another freelance class action suit settled
A tentative settlement worth approximately $5.5 million was reached on behalf of freelancers with a group of publishers including the Toronto Star Newspapers and Rogers Publishing. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice will consider the tentative settlement in April. Many Canadian freelance writers have heard of Robertson v. Thomson, a 2006 decision of the Supreme Court of […]
Reader’s Digest to feed MSN.ca
The Canadian Magazines blog is reporting that Reader’s Digest has a deal with MSN.ca to provide lifestyle and travel content in French and English for the news website. The Canadian Writers Group, which represents writers who provide content to Reader’s Digest, has made a formal inquiry to the magazine about how writers will be compensated for […]
2011 and the digital platform
Happy 2011! You will hear nonstop about the “digital platform.” Masthead published all kinds of end-of-year interviews with publishers and they’re all bullish on big-D digital, of course. Reader’s Digest‘s Tony Cioffi says: “2011 will be focused on Digital, developing products and expanding our current brands and launching new ones to support our multi-brand and multi-platform […]
Reuters to use “stringers” for new US wire service
Thomson Reuters is launching what it is calling a “domestic news service” in the US to rival the Associated Press and CNN Wire. The service, dubbed Reuters America, will provide text, photos and video to newspaper, TV and online pubilshing clients. The first client is the Tribune Co, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA […]
Required reading for Canadian freelancers
The Canadian Magazines blog offers a succinct review of a new book it says “should be read by every freelancer, agency, editor and publisher” in Canada. Copyright, Contracts, Creators: New Media, New Rules is written by Osgoode Hall law school professor Giuseppina D’Agostino. The description of the book includes this gem: “The Internet-fueled recycling of existing […]
Signs of optimism as 2010 winds down
Magazine and newspaper publishers have some news to smile about south of the border. The first comes from Jim Romenesko at Poynter: newspapers can look forward to an increase in digital ad revenue next year, according to industry consultant Kubas. You can see the Kubas forecast here. What’s more, there’s a signal that the death of print […]
Rogers refuses to remove writer’s work from Yahoo
This fall, Rogers Publishing started syndicating work by independent journalists on line. The Canadian Writers Group (CWG) noticed in September that stories from late 2009 and early 2010 by Patricia Pearson and Ellen Vanstone, first published in Chatelaine, were posted on Yahoo’s “Lifestyle” site. When an editor at Chatelaine was contacted, she had no explanation […]
