True/Slant seeks to build a network of beatbloggers that pays
There’s a new Web news and commentary site coming to town — and this one pays its contributors.
True/Slant seeks to provide a novel approach for bloggers to produce quality news in a way that is profitable, while also building a site that appeals to advertisers. True/Slant is especially relevant for beatbloggers who are weighing the pros and cons of being an independent journalist. True/Slant, in its early “alpha” stage, looks like a loosely aligned network of beatbloggers.
Journalists who are invited to contribute to the site will have the opportunity to operate independently while still remaining part of a network. For stand-alone beatbloggers who have struggled to find an audience while making a profit out of it, branding themselves as a True/Slant contributor may prove helpful.
So far, more than 65 journalists have accepted True/Slant’s invitation to join their network. As a contributor, you receive a page on which you can create your own blog, free of editorial control. The roster includes writers for publications such as the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Time magazine, as well as independent bloggers. The topics covered by contributors include money, politics, health, technology, sports and more.
Each page also contains “headline grabs,” links from other new sites that are compiled to by contributors. And in an effort to promote interaction between the contributors and readers, contributors are required to comment on each other’s posts and respond to readers’ comments.
Although the site will not be officially launched until May, curiosity seekers have been able to check out the site in its preliminary alpha stage. At first glance, the site looks like any other news site with dozens of headlines. However, like the site’s motto, “News is more than what happens,” the interesting stuff is taking place behind the reported stories.
The Wall Street Journal’s Walter S. Mossberg reported that in addition to receiving a small salary, contributors will also receive a share of the advertising and sponsorship revenues generated by their individual pages.
“The plan is to turn them into minipublishers under the True/Slant umbrella,” Mossberg noted.
One of True/Slant’s unusual business practices, Mossberg pointed out, is the decision to allow advertisers to create their own blogs to attract followers. The advertisers’ blogs will look similar to the blogs of journalists, but will be labeled as ad content.
Whether or not True/Slant’s unusual mix of journalistic entrepreneurship and advertising will work remains to be seen. Although readers have started to trickle in, it is still unclear how the majority of readers will react to a site that offers a multiplicity of voices and styles as opposed to a single style of writing.
Readers may also object to some aspects of the site’s layout. It is impossible, for instance, to find a complete list of topics covered by contributors. Instead, there is a list of “hot topics” that changes weekly.
There is also the possibility that readers will not be interested in the content of True/Slant’s contributors.
“The hype around True/Slant…comes entirely from journalists intrigued by True/Slant’s pay-per-pageview scheme, plus its plan to let advertisers have blogs on the site,” writes Paul Boutin in The Industry Standard. “For those of us who don’t care about these machinations and just want something to read, the site fails to ignite.”
Love it or hate it, as Mossberg points out, True/Slant is another example of the way the Web is changing traditional media.
