Putting a Price on Words

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Last year, Sam Apple got the idea into his head that what the world needed was a new kind of newspaper. This was, to put it mildly, at odds with the consensus of the marketplace. At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist. The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online. But Apple, a 34-year-old writer, wasn’t ready to give up on journalism as a profit-making enterprise. He began telling friends about his plans to start a Web publication called The Faster Times.

Apple quit his part-time gig as director of interactive media for the Web site Nerve.com in New York and began recruiting. It wasn’t hard to find people eager to join. Employment in New York’s publishing sector shrank by a tenth last year, leaving behind a mass of glum, jobless writers. The good news, though, was that one of the very forces that was sapping industry profits — the Web’s demolition of barriers to entry — also made it quite simple and cheap for anyone to become a journalism entrepreneur. Using open-source software, which Apple hired programmers to customize, The Faster Times could get up and running for less than $20,000.

Before the site went live last summer, Apple and a group of editors held marathon meetings at a Brooklyn coffee shop with free wireless Internet. In one sense, The Faster Times was supposed to be a traditional publication, staffed by trained journalists covering a wide range of beats and guided by a coherent editorial mission. Where Apple’s model departed from convention, as a matter of necessity, was in the area of compensation. He couldn’t afford to offer salaries and benefits, or even flat freelance fees, so instead he promised contributors 75 percent of the revenues from all advertisements placed next to their articles. Payments would start small, but if The Faster Times prospered, as Apple hoped, so would its writers. He referred to the publication as a journalistic “collective,” but in truth it was a small experiment in capitalistic incentives: contributors would profit directly from their work, according to the market’s assessment of its value.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Journalism-t.html?th&emc=th