Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.
Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest—known also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for AOL’s new Seed form of journalism.
AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Programming Director of Seed.
How’s this all going to work? Well, fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s 2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire. AOL solicited freelance writers on its music site Spinner. Those interested in contributing were redirected to Seed, where they signed up. Hansell asked for work experience, music tastes, and clips. He says: “I can tell you now that we didn’t read the clips. We looked at these things to see if people can follow directions and if they didn’t write us 1,000 words when we asked for 100. And that was the criteria.”
Next, each of the more than two thousand bands that will play at SXSW were assigned to a Seedster to interview. Hansell says he had his fingers crossed. “I think we’re over the hump of my darkest fears,” he says, “and I had many of them. The first dark fear was we’d get total losers. The second fear was how good the interviews would be. “
Now, with first results surfacing on Spinner, Hansell says, “The people who sent us e-mails back were entertainment writers for weekend publications, kids in J-school who are also in bands, exactly the right type of people.” But they aren’t treated exactly like journalists. Hansell points out that Seedsters don’t get a press pass—if they want to hear the bands live they’ll have to buy their own ticket. But he expects some number of folks to try and hustle their way into shows by waving around their AOL clips. “That’s just expected.”
With clips like these, Seed writers are held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. AOL Music’s managing editor Melissa Olund and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what doesn’t.
Why launch at South By Southwest? For Hansell, that was a no-brainer. “I know it is communicating our ambition. We are about reporting. We are about doing big and interesting things.” The big SXSW bet is that Hansell and his Seedsters can make more content, faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else. In addition the distributed community of potential contributors on Seed, AOL already employs 3,500 professional journalists on staff or as regular freelancers. And AOL has some interesting content search technology from its earlier acquisitions of Relegence and Truveo.
Man vs. Machine: The Bionic Solution
AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.
“I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell. “Left brain, right brain. We are trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a person.” It’s a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band interviews to prove it works.
Is AOL trying to beat Google at the news gathering game? Hansell says it’s far more than that. “Google News will give you a whole clump of things that are probably about the same thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But it can’t tell you what it’s really about. It can’t summarize it. It can’t translate it into people language.”
The Ugly Economics: Not My Problem
So, what about cost? Some freelancers are complaining that the web doesn’t pay a living wage. “That is not my problem” Says Hansell. He quickly rephrases, “It is my problem but I didn’t do that, the world did that.”
He is however trying to sort it out. Asks Hansell: “How do you deal with the fact that the economics of the Internet can’t let you pay what people think that a freelancer can get paid? One way is you give them a bundle. If you give them ten of the same assignments, even if the price is low, by the time they’re done with the tenth one, they can do the tenth one in half the time they could do the first one.”
Here’s another one of Hansell’s analogies: “Seed is to freelancing as Ebay is to classified ads.” AOL’s Seed may be the future of freelance, but the math remains daunting; “The fact that we gave somebody ten interviews to do after she did one or two before, she’s delighted. That’s 500 bucks. That’s 500 bucks more than she was going to make doing something else, and it’s fun.” Well, “delighted” might be pushing it. Pumping out ten assignments for the price of what many professional freelancers charge for one will favor quantity over quality.
But if it all works—if Bionic Journalism can attract a massive audience and save AOL—what’s the home run? Here Hansell gets a little bit ahead of himself, but at least he is thinking big:
“It’s the most high risk improbable outcome, but the most exciting, which is that we become the most dominant force in journalism, broadly defined, in the Twenty-First Century. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what Tim is shooting for. That’s what I’m shooting for.”
And it all starts this weekend with 2,000 indie rock band interviews.
Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video curation platform that powers more than 68,000 web sites. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur and Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker. Watch his video notes of Saul Hansell talking about Bionic Journalism and AOL’s larger journalistic ambitions by clicking in the two previous links. .Follow Steve on Twitter.
Why anyone would resort to this level of freelancing is beyond me. There are free publishing platforms already out there like WordPress and Blogger and Google AdSense to help you get started in monetizing content that you will own forever. Instead you are getting paid peanuts for write content that you will not own and can not continuously monetize.
While this could be successful I just don’t see the profit margins being there for what investors expect for a publicly traded company.
The quality of content on these freelance systems will never be as good as an individual motivated to build reputation and a sphere of influence.
The goal isn’t to deliver real value to an audience. The goal is production.
All content creators will have to create content and develop relationships with their audience.
I look forward to these forms of content creation failing.
Among a host of other reasons I won’t get into, this is why I left my Editor position at Download Squad after nearly 3 years and triple digit percentage increases in readership.
I wish AOL luck — and I had a great deal of hope for Armstrong — but I won’t hang around and filter/edit/publish crappy generic content that is both lacking in quality, and overall too expensive (internally) to sustain.
Question: Do the freelancers get credit for writing the articles or does AOL just slap their name on it?
If the writers get credit for it, then it is all about street cred and getting their names out there. While I feel most of the article won’t be of the caliber and quality most professional writers do, you will definitely be able to weed out the good ones.
While I have no idea if this can work on this scale, I’ve been experimenting with using non-professional writers as neighborhood stringers in Brooklyn and so far it’s working quite well. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post saying I was looking for a handful of folks from neighborhoods I don’t get to regularly enough to cover things like store and restaurant openings. I said the pay would be $20 per post, and I received about 75 responses. Still sorting through them now, but a couple have started and it’s a win-win. I’m the first to market with the news and the stringers are having fun and making some good walking around money without an onerous time commitment. As Hansell points out, the trick is for the writers to be able to write about stuff they would likely already be doing. In his case, attending rock concerts; in my case, walking down the street and noticing that a new buildings permit has gone up in the window of a deserted storefront. As long as they have a camera on them at all times, the marginal amount of work for them will only be about 20 minutes to write up a short post. And 20 bucks for that ain’t bad, especially for an underemployed person. And for this content, anyone’s who’s written a decent college English paper in his time is more than qualified in the journalism department.
That is a good looking community you have built and I assume your CPMs are pretty good so you can pay $20 an article. Nice work. When are you going to expand past Brooklyn? You have a really good model there.
It’s great that there are new business models available that involve ruining existing businesses, based on exploiting desperate, under-qualified people. Isn’t capitalism great? Let’s all applaud now, shall we?
There is a huge difference between Great writing and average writing. If you are a great writer people will follow you wherever you go. Unfortunately if you are an average writer working for a newspaper but the management thought you were a good writer you got the benefit of a salary and distribution. But if readers can’t tell the difference between your writing and a cheap freelancer that means as a salaried newspaper writer you are now out of luck in this day and age.
Lets face it. Because of the internet, great writers who draw eyeballs can make more money but mediocre writers are going to make a lot less.
Not sure who that last comment was directed at but I spent over two years of nearly full-time work without seeing a dime of compensation before my blog was at the point where I could start monetizing it, so I certainly don’t see paying someone $20 for a post that takes less than half an hour exploitative in the slightest. It’s a free country, man!
I hope the freelancers down in Austin are smart enough to catch details like the fact that Saul Hansell doesn’t work for the NYT.
The relatively well-paid folks at TechCrunch can’t seem to remember that and they’ve included a link to the NYT Bits blog at the bottom.
Seed is an interesting concept for sourcing news from disparate and hard to access locations, eg hyper-local news.
The AOL SXSW coverage sounds naive and misguided, with a very large risk of being a total mess.
The festival is a mass of events and happening – and what seems to be missing here is any sense of editorial oversight on what is even worth reporting.
In terms of SXSW Music, of the 1,800 bands, the more interesting ones will have handlers around them that won’t let random strangers try and get interviews, equally a lot of the bands won’t have stories that are yet interesting to the public.
As someone who’s going there, I get the sense that AOL won’t be able to give me advice about what to see, neither will they sort out the more musically important from the mass of ’4th on a line-up at a day time gig’.
LP33.tv, who I work for, are fielding 25 bloggers and vloggers – but we’ve spent 3 months working out which bands are worth talking about, which have longevity and which have a story and approaching those to make sure we get time and space to do a good journalistic job.
Our aim is provide a plenty of rich, meaningful content from across the festival, but not drown the best in an overload of everything- and be a source of valuable information.
I may be biased, but I know which site will provide a quality experience, rather than a splashy press release.
The true issue with SEED though is that most of the articles available at Seed.com are not “assigned out” as were the articles referenced in this piece. Instead, any number of writers can write the same topic, basically “on spec” and AOL’s editor gets to choose one or two, or even NONE.
The freelancers referenced in this piece here seem to have worked in the more traditional way, as in “Mary, you interview X band” and only Mary does that- not Mary and 5 writer-competitors all for one band.
This Seed model– the one at Seed.com- is nothing new to AOL, it is the same model as other content mills such as Helium.com’s Marketplace. Solid writers do not need to write on spec under most circumstances.
get stuffed
http://www.confessionhub.com
This is already working for some, just not the AOL is trying to do it. AOL is at the right forest, but is barking at the forest. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise” — yes, but grouped noise is still noise.