Bad SEED Wants (Almost) Free Ride
I’ve seen organizations try this before. Hey let’s pay video bloggers $50 to do $1200 worth that a pro would do - but they’ll be so excited to do - they’ll be coming in droves. So the quality won’t be so hot - maybe we’ll get lucky! Wait! Holy crap! Let’s do it with journalism! Yeah! 1000 word interviews, and sweetly crafted 500 word biographies yield a handsome 50 smackeroos. This doesn’t work! When will people realize that you get what you pay for? Now if this were some citizen journalism not for profit - you might get quality content like The Uptake in Minnesota - but for a company like AOL to come out and try this - I think it’s a bit absurd. “Light, fun questions…” that’s about all you should expect. Oi.
In what he hopes will be the first big demonstration of the “crowdsourcing” potential of AOL’s new Seed.com service, former New York Times writer Saul Hansell says he is looking for writers who will write up interviews with all of 2,000 or so bands and artists at the SXSW music festival in Austin. The assignment will involve “real reporting,” Hansell said in an interview, in which writers will have to pick up the phone and call the band or artist and write up a 1,000-word interview in question-and-answer format, as well as a 300- to 500-word biography. The price for this assignment? The princely sum of $50.
He also said that Seed was “not trying to find something new to say about Bruce Springsteen for the cover of Rolling Stone,” but instead was expecting “light, fun questions” and that the project was an experiment (AOL recently bought a video production studio called StudioNow to add to the Seed network). As he put it to me:
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RT @scottstead Bad SEED Wants (Almost) Free Ride http://amplify.com/u/1mct - weak.
1 month ago