Attracting Writers for Crowdsourced News App [closed]
Closed by System on Mar 9, 2018 at 12:24
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I developed a news platform for people to know the most important 5-10 news stories every day. The apps/platform is targeted at people (like me) who don't read much news but would like to stay informed without much effort.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instancea.nwsty&hl=en https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nwsty-skim-top-news-headlines/id1239262949?mt=8
Currently, I have a writer who writes the stories on a daily basis. I suggest the news stories (through an algorithm I built and also manual work), read edit and publish the news she writes through the platform. However, the process has become so laborious for me (I am not a writer) and also limits the time I got to spend on the development of the platform. I've been doing this since May 2017. I believe this plaform is extremely useful for the right user (also the users, about 500 daily active on apps, find a lot of use from the apps) and really want to keep this going.
My question for you is, is there a way that I can make the news writing moderation etc crowdsourced? At this point, I would really like true journalists who see the value in the platform and care about providing good news to take over this project.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/34016. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I think this is a "you can if you can" answer. If you have 500, put a billboard on your site that says
"Looking for writers, editors, research, moderation.
We want to crowd-source this site! Join us!
Any level of participation welcome; enjoy the warm
glow of satisfaction in a job well done for no pay.
Plus people reading your work and endless gratitude
for your community service.
Look, Linux did it, thousands upon thousands of programmers do work for Linux for free, sometimes just a few hours a week. The reason they do is because they do think it is a a community service. A critical selling point of Linux is nobody (in the Linux foundation) is making any fortunes; although many make a decent living. So it depends to an extent on how you frame it; but Linux is a success story and would be a billion dollar product if its reach, users and fan base were in the commercial realm.
I don't think anybody would argue that "OS level programmers" is not a paid job, it is very highly paid, but you get people that spend a day tracking down a bug for nothing but their name in the code, basically.
Advertise, you already have a platform. Reach out to your readers, and whoever they know, and (since you are the developer) develop online ways for these people to interact, with queues for story submissions, queues for stories that need review, queues for writers to get story ideas, queues for research to be done, queues for editors, and ways for people to notify superiors about abuse or writing problems.
Edit: You can also pay the writer to act as initial reviewer or editor for online submissions, to cultivate more writers.
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