Not so many moons ago, journalistic stripes were earned with shoe leather and so many turns of phrase.

Nowadays, though, Finance 101 and Innovation 212 are as likely as Reporting and Editing Basics to be on the course list of aspiring – and working – journalists around the world. The hunt for new business models has spawned countless conference sessions around Europe. Most have eyebrow-furrowing titles like: Can Video Save the Print Industry?, Will News Content Work on Social Networking Sites?, The Content and Business of Mobile News?, Does the Regional Media Have a Future?, and the worrying, Bigger than Hollywood: What all Media Can Learn from Video Games.

Note the many question marks.

In such a climate, its easy to grant the dynamic team at AllVoices.com multiple exclamation points for doing enough mental yoga to wrap their minds around an idea that seems to have lost credence in the mainstream: That readership and “reach” are a result of paying reporters and writers for quality content. And paying those contributors be they “just” citizens or the endangered species known as journalists.

AllVoices is a start-up platform to which anyone can contribute via SMS, MMS, e-mail or telephone. Authors create their own pages on which to post content. Stories and images are tagged and shuffled into the following categories: Politics, Business, Conflict & Tragedy, Science & Technology, Sports and Entertainment. Stories culled from around 3,500 mainstream news feeds are also folded in.

The small print leaves a big impression:

• ”For every 10,000 (up to one million) Page Views (as defined below) of User Contributions, User Reports, and User Submissions submitted by You, allvoices shall pay you one hundred dollars (US $100.00) (subtracting transaction processing costs); or
• For every 100,000 (up to one million) Page Views (as defined below) of User Contributions, User Reports, and User Submissions submitted by You, allvoices shall pay you one thousand dollars (US $1,000.00) (subtracting transaction processing costs); or
• For the first one million Page Views of Your User Contributions, User Reports, and User Submissions, allvoices shall pay You ten thousand dollars (US $10,000.00) (subtracting transaction processing costs) (each of (i) and (ii) a “Promotional Payment”).”

Talk about swimming upstream. As alleged Luddite Andrew Keen wrote about the proliferation of Web 2.0,

• “The greatest losers, then, in this great cultural transformation are our traditional creative class – professional musicians, journalists, film-makers, photographers and animators—who are now struggling to monetize their talent in an advertising saturated economy where all the serious cash is being channeled to technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace.”

So it’s nice to see the bank for the AllVoices project coming from venture capital. Maybe serious investors and people interested in quality content can have a quality relationship, after all. And to think, even, that this coupling could produce a project motivated by such altruism:

“Last year I volunteered with Relief International’s livelihoods team in Mansera, Pakistan to setup micro-credits programs for the most vulnerable women,” wrote project leader Amra Tareen, who holds an MBA from Harvard. “The widows and orphans of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. I was on the ground for a short period of time, in Mansera and Balakot, but it was an experience that inspired me. The women and people “on the ground” were very resilient, they had strong belief that they will be okay regardless of what happens. I wanted to share my experience with the rest of the world to see what was really going on the ground. There was so much to tell, but how could I communicate?. I had pictures of the devastation and destruction, I had stories of heroism, I felt the compassion of people who where good and generous to the core, even though they had nothing. How do I get this message out? Do I send an email to CNN?, Do I write a blog that no will ever find?...This inspired me to start a company that would let people no matter where they were to write about what they knew about an event, upload photos, videos, and write their stories and views and share with the rest of the world.”

The staff page of AllVoices seems to closely mirror its target audience: A rainbow of faces from Pakistan, India, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States. Several have engineering or marketing backgrounds. The geographical and intellectual diversity of backgrounds is no doubt a contributing factor to the dynamism of bringing to fruition the concept of paying results-based wages to citizen journalists.

Published: November 7, 2008