Wanna be a citizen journalist? It's gonna cost you. At least in some cases it will: Major League Baseball being one and Weatherbug being the latest.
What you pay and what you get in each of these examples is very different, but in neither case are you being compensated for your work. (Full disclosure time: I'm with GetLocalNews.com, which announced a new citizen journalism payment program in April. It's too early to say what kind of money anyone's making on this initiative.)
Let's take WeatherBug first:
Actually, I like the direction they're headed with the announcement of the new WeatherBug Backyard Reporter program. It always irks me when I look for a weather report and the forecast is for some airport that's dozens of microclimates away. The answer: backyard citizen weather reporters. WeatherBug already has 8,000 tracking stations across the country at schools and businesses. For instance, when I go to WeatherBug and plug in my zip code, I get actual local weather from a station at Matthew Turner Elementary School in Benicia. Nice. But if you do want to be one of those backyard weather reporters, you'll need to purchase a weather station, which would be pretty cool but would set you back $500. When do these reporters get a cut?
MLBlogs:
The concept is great. Major League Baseball lets anyone create a blog about their favorite team. Instant new content for mlb.com, which promises to "reward selected members of this community by adding their words of wisdom to MLB.com's online highlight reels." What do you get for contributing web pages? You get to pay $4.95 a month. Many fans will sign up simply for the chance to have their blog be part of the MLB network. But others simply are chafed at the idea of being charged. Admittedly, one of the benefits of charging is that it weeds out people who are just toying with the blog and will wind up clogging up the system with blogs that never get updated. The least MLB could do though is offer paying bloggers a discount on shopping for team paraphernalia or one of MLB's video or audio services. One other tip: It's time to provide team-by-team listings so I can find bloggers about my favorite team from MLB.com's home page.
Most citizen journalism experiments that solicit contributions from the general readership don't involve payments by or to the authors. They get exposure and they get a forum for their thoughts. Poynter's Steve Outing suggested several months ago a model of compensation with T-shirts, prizes or discounts on classifieds ads. I'm not big on the T-shirt idea, except perhaps to attract that first contribution to a site, but it may make sense to offer discounts on services the site offers.
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