Posts under ‘Business Models’

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.” […]

UPDATED One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, […]

In this season for giving, let me point you to Global Voices Online, which aggregates blogs and other citizen-based media from around the globe. GV, a non-profit organization (I’m an advisor), has been supported in recent years with foundation grants, but it needs wider support. I’ve sent some funds, and hope you will consider doing […]

Mark Glaser: MediaShift . Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business? Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. “It” is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, […]

Josh Marshall observes the 8th birthday of Talking Points Memo today and suggests there’s even better to come. TPM is one of the great examples of how new media can work. Marshall is one of the best journalists of our time, helping to reinvent our craft. He deserves our continued support and praise.

David Cohn, one of the bright lights among new journalists, has launched Spot.us, a site that aims to persuade people from communities to send money to support excellent journalism about specific issues. I’m an advisor to this project and believe strongly that he’s onto something important. Spot.us describes itself as “a nonprofit project to pioneer […]

David Silverberg interviewed me for a series he’s running on DigitalJournal.com. My entry is called “The Journalist With a Business Edge“.

Here’s the latest from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (funder of some of our work) on its 21st Century News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. The deadline for applications is Nov. 1, 2008. With the […]

Open Salon is a user-generated site with some differences, the notable one being a tip jar that, one hopes, will lead to people being rewarded for their work. It’s not an original idea — OhmyNews has had this for years — but it’s a worthwhile one. One of the more interesting items is this speculative […]

(This is the thirteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, […]