Snark Bytes
USAVoice.org: Just another dud on the media landscape
8-3-2006

 
Well, it’s official: USAVoice is just another irritating, hype-laden non-starter out there in the ether, a marketing tool masquerading as new journalism. Having billed itself as the Internet’s answer to CNN (as if that wasn’t a dead giveaway right there), it missed its debut deadline — twice in one month — and hasn’t uttered a peep. As of Wednesday, August 2nd, its home page was still promising a start date of July 31st, and nothing new had been added to the site that this writer could find. All of which tempts one to say: Get lost, you bloody posers — and quit jerking around my colleagues!

Even if they eventually made an appearance and start doing business as a news outlet, at this point they’ve already lost what little credibility any such start-up might have. And that’s the kiss of death.

Meanwhile, they got an awful lot of e-mail addresses and other information out of freelance or unemployed journalists who applied looking for real jobs in online journalism. Poor saps. I was almost one of them, and I understand the temptation.

At a time when so many mid-career journalists are out of work and would jump at the chance to do real, serious journalism, it seems particularly cruel for someone to advertise reporting and editing jobs on the scale that this outfit did (see previous blog entry below). The only result that I’ve been able to detect is the raising of a lot of false hopes and, possibly, a marketing-related con job. Then again, many applicants were wary from the start, including yours truly. Thankfully, we journalists are naturally a suspicious, skeptical lot, and I’d like to think that few of us put much trust in this particular scam.

But I’m still wondering where the money came from for all those job ads …

Another, more promising effort along similar lines seems to be on the horizon: NewAssignment.Net, a project that NYU media critic and academic Jay Rosen introduced last week in his media blog, Pressthink. It has some interesting thinking behind it and some real start-up money, including a contribution from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com.

NewAssignment sounds like an attempt to merge citizen journalism with professional journalism, thereby covering stories and issues that larger, established media outlets might skip or miss. It will use real journalists to do the writing and editing, Rosen says, but story ideas will typically originate from within a community.

I’m still not completely clear myself on just what the difference is supposed to be between civic journalism (investigative?), citizen journalism (oh, wait: that's the amateurs), and plain old-fashioned journalism, nor am I entirely comfortable with the notion of being a community journalist for hire — I’ll have more to say about that and about Rosen’s project in my next post — and I wouldn’t go so far yet as to call Rosen’s idea intriguing; but for now, let’s just say that at least it’s being discussed, tested and tweaked out in the open and we know who’s behind it, which is more than anyone can say about USAVoice. And if NewAssignment gets off the ground soon, I’ll be right up there at the front of the line with everyone else, hoping to get one of those bright, shiny new assignments.

Hey, a gal’s gotta make a living …

Meanwhile, there’s Nicholas Lemann’s article on citizen journalism/blogging, in The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060807fa_fact1