 |
For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts
It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.
The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.
Anil Dash, a former blogger and current vice president at Six Apart, announced the program Nov. 14, shortly after the company made its own staff cuts. Mr. Dash fired off a blog post: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”
On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”
Brooke-Sidney Gavins, a broadcast journalism student at the University of Southern California, is hoping to be chosen to help her nascent writing career. “I understand that there may not be a ‘guaranteed’ job with a major media organization after I graduate,” Ms. Gavins said. “A lot of new journalists are going to have to build their careers more guerrilla-style by selling their stories and promoting their work all the time.”
For Johanna Neuman, a veteran White House reporter and blogger who was recently laid off by The Los Angeles Times, the program would be a chance to continue writing about politics and float book ideas in the hopes of landing a publishing deal. “I might just start putting chapters up and see who salutes,” Ms. Neuman said.
Mr. Dash says he hopes to eventually accept every applicant. “How do we do right by all these people?” he said. “That’s exactly what’s keeping me up at night.” JENNA WORTHAM
3 comments:
There is a good book by Daniel Pink called "Flight of the Creative Class." Your post seems to indicate a lot of what Pink talks about, except that he thought it would happen less because of layoffs and more because they had the opportunity and could make more money (if I remember correctly--I read the book last year sometime and so am a bit fuzzy.) Its worth a look in either case.
It would be interesting to take a closer at how MinnPost came about... had a thriving economy continued would those that created it have wanted to leave their jobs to enter the world of "new media"... in other words, would they have been content with the salaries and perks associated with what they were doing or would they have ventured out on their testing the markets consumption of a product like MinnPost... as it is, it does give a voice to many of the talented journalists in our community.
Hopefully I'll be able to touch on this in my paper, at least in a general sense. That's a whole project in itself waiting to happen.
Post a Comment