An online news start-up is going where Google and other giants haven’t: sharing revenue with the people who write the news.
Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level.
It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.
We’ve already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy.
Arnon Mishkin says he has found the fallacy of the link economy but I think his argument is itself built on some fallacies, among them:
As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.
Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators. So what are newspapers to do?
Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown has more than her much-ballyhooed bio of Bill and Hillary Clinton coming down the pipeline: Radar has learned that the erstwhile “Queen of Buzz” is partnering with InterActiveCorp (IACI) honcho Barry Diller to launch her own news aggregator Web site.
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