links for 2011-02-28

If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions. Here are a few: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Hunch, Reddit, MetaFilter, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, About, Quora, Ebay, Yelp, Flickr, IMDB, Amazon.com, Craigslist, GitHub, SourceForge, every messageboard or site with comments, 4Chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Plus the entire Open Source movement. If you spend more time on sites like those listed here than you do reading books, watching TV, or visiting sites like ESPN.com or NYTimes.com, then, like me, the web is now your native medium.

Again, the purpose is to focus on stories being missed. And considering the size of newsrooms in some of these communities, plenty of stories up for grabs, through no fault of the staff.

Of the three news gathering organizations and one news aggregator represented on the hypernews panel late last week, only one, the Alternative Press, actually claims to be profitable. And it accomplishes that feat by, among other things, paying its freelance journalists between $25 and $50 per story and using commission-only advertising sales representatives to sell advertising to local merchants.

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