| No, funding individual pieces. Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience. If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding. Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals. A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate. I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year. Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads. Monetize the creation and not the distribution. |