writing for free. or close to it...

Go here for an inside look at life on the "content farm". It's a look at the uber-creepy underbelly of digital journalism. If only all the underemployed journalists would just say NO...

The MediaShift piece, by Corbin Hier, starts thus:

"We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year," AOL's media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Eun suggested that AOL could double its existing stable of 500 full-time editorial staffers in addition to expanding its network of 40,000 freelance contributors. Many of the jobs will be added to its hyper-local venture, Patch, while the majority of AOL's freelancers will work for the company's content farms -- Seed and the recently acquired video production operation, StudioNow.

These two areas into which AOL is ambitiously expanding are the fastest growing sectors of the journalism market. Hyper-local networks like Outside.in and content farms such as Demand Media are flourishing. As Eun's bold prediction indicates, more and more journalists will end up working for new online content producers. What will these new gigs be like? To better understand, I reached out to people who have already worked with some of the big players.

And then gathered stories like this one about the worst -- and the biggest money maker -- of the bunch, Demand Media:

"A lot of my friends did it and we had a lot of fun with it," said one graduate of a top journalism graduate program when asked about her work for Demand Media. "We just made fun of whatever we wrote."

The former "content creator" -- that's what Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt calls his freelance contributors -- asked to be identified only as a working journalist for fear of "embarrassing" her current employer with her content farm-hand past. She began working for Demand in 2008, a year after graduating with honors from a prestigious journalism program. It was simply a way for her to make some easy money. In addition to working as a barista and freelance journalist, she wrote two or three posts a week for Demand on "anything that I could remotely punch out quickly."

The articles she wrote -- all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list -- included How to Wear a Sweater Vest" and How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed," even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog.

As if that weren't demoralizing enough, Demand pays the grand sum of about 15 bucks per piece in order to take advantage of struggling journalists. One free-lancer, who wrote for Demand to supplement his salary as an adjunct professor, only made it worthwhile by writing three pieces an hour for four hours a day. You can imagine the quality of the reporting. Oh, wait.

When the industry appears to be crumbling around us, you do what you gotta do. I'm sure that there are a good number of folks who swallow their pride just because they want to write. But please, let's don't call it journalism. Or kid ourselves that digital outfits like Demand are going to fill the void. bk

meanwhile ...

... I came across this piece on journalism education by Dan Gilmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication.

Writing on PBS' MediaShift, Gilmor finds that journalism education needs to educate both the practioner as well as the consumer, and to teach principles as the foundation -- and practice as an "evolving superstructure," in an increasingly digital world.

The Cronkite School, where I'm teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn't nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers -- by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

The principles underpin everything I believe about modern media consumption in general -- entertainment being the major exception -- and journalism in particular. Especially for the creators of media, they add up to being honorable.

If the principles are the foundation, the practices and tactics are an evolving superstructure. Journalism education needs to deal with both.

to blog or not to blog...

That's the question posed in a post by Mark Glaser on MediaShift, his PBS-sponsored blog that tracks the ways in which the digital media revolution is changing our world.

His post digs into the story of one NYU journalism student who, after blogging about one of her journalism classes, was apparently called to the woodshed by her professor and told not to blog, not to twitter and not to write about the class again. The professor found the student's blog to be an invasion of privacy of the other students in the class.

But then, isn't forbidding students to blog about a class a restriction of free speech?

Interesting post, interesting comments, all multi-layered. On a deeper level, the post illustrates one of the many ways in which evolving technologies are changing the rules and forcing us to reconsider what we thought we knew. (Think l'affaire Mayhill Fowler.)

So join the conversation: So much more fun than learning AP Style. Not that there's anything wrong with that. bk