Citizen-News Syndicates
Free news services, such as History Commons and Source Watch, are demonstrating the value of publishing blog posts under licenses that allow sharing of content within the blogosphere. Unfortunately for the blogosphere, full copyright protection is the default status of any published work. Full copyright protection can seriously limit the sharing and redistribution of published work, making it difficult for bloggers, to publish an interesting, comprehensive, and current treatment of a topic or issue. Furthoremore, the for-profit revenue models of many online news services drives them to emphasis the use and distribution of current content and neglecting the collection of archived material to provide comprehensive treatments of a subject.
To demonstrate the value of less restrictive licensing, History Commons and Source Watch emphasize the cataloging of contemporary accounts to provide comprehensive treatments of a subject.
Other syndication services such as AllVoices and AssociatedContent, combine liberal licensing with a revene-generating model to create a news service that covers topics and areas from the 60% of the world not well covered by major news gatherers. AllVoices generates most of its revenue through advertising and plans to pay contributors when their work is used while allowing contributors to retain copyright to their material. AssociatedContent has a similar model, though it pays authors for submitting work rather than when their work is used.
This story is based on reports from on Journalism.co.uk, AssociatedContent.com, and Wikipedia.
Last updated 69 days ago by Steve Ornburn
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