Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven
Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.
Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast
becoming one of the key the places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South
By Southwest—know also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for
AOL’s new Seed
form of journalism.
AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both
introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and
test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original
content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party,
according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Program Director of Seed.
How’s this all going to work? Well, fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s
2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire. AOL solicited freelance
writers on its music site Spinner. Those interested in contributing were redirected to Seed,
where they signed up. Hansell asked for work experience, music tastes, and clips. He says:
“I can tell you now that we didn’t read the clips. We looked at these things to see
if people can follow directions and if they didn’t write us 1,000 words when we asked for
100. And that was the criteria.”
Next, each of the more than two thousand bands that will play at SXSW were assigned to a Seedster
to interview. Hansell says he had his fingers crossed. “I think we’re over the hump
of my darkest fears,” he says, “and I had many of them. The first dark fear was
we’d get total losers. The second fear was how good the interviews would be. “
Now, with first results surfacing on Spinner,
Hansell says, “The people who sent us e-mails back were entertainment writers for weekend
publications, kids in J-school who are also in bands, exactly the right type of people.”
But they aren’t treated exactly like journalists. Hansell points out that Seedsters
don’t get a press pass—if they want to hear the bands live they’ll
have to buy their own ticket. But he expects some number of folks to try and hustle their way
into shows by waving around their AOL clips. “That’s just expected.”
With clips like these, Seed writers are
held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. spinner’s editor
Melissa Owen and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what
doesn’t.
Why launch at South By Southwest? For Hansell, that was a no-brainer. “I know it is
communicating our ambition. We are about reporting. We are about doing big and interesting
things.” The big SXSW bet is that Hansell and his Seedsters can make more content, faster,
better, and cheaper than anyone else. In addition the distributed community of potential
contributors on Seed, AOL already employs 3,500 professional journalists on staff or as regular
freelancers. And AOL has some interesting content search technology from its earlier acquisitions
of Relegence and Truveo.
Man vs. Machine: The Bionic Solution
AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part
aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass
content creation space. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from
noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best
bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the
assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.
“I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell. “Left brain, right brain. We are
trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a
person.” It’s a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band
interviews to prove it works.
Is AOL trying to beat Google at the news gathering game? Hansell says it’s far more than
that. “Google News will give you a whole clump of things that are probably about the same
thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But it can’t tell you what it’s really
about. It can’t summarize it. It can’t translate it into people language.”
The Ugly Economics: Not My Problem
So, what about cost? Some freelancers are complaining that the web doesn’t pay a living
wage. “That is not my problem” Says Hansell. He quickly rephrases, “It
is my problem but I didn’t do that, the world did that.”
He is however trying to sort it out. Asks Hansell: “How do you deal with the fact that the
economics of the Internet can’t let you pay what people think that a freelancer can get
paid? One way is you give them a bundle. If you give them ten of the same assignments, even if
the price is low, by the time they’re done with the tenth one, they can do the tenth one in
half the time they could do the first one.”
Here’s another one of Hansell’s analogies: “Seed is to freelancing as Ebay is
to classified ads.” AOL’s Seed may be the future of freelance, but the math remains
daunting; “The fact that we gave somebody ten interviews to do after she did one or two
before, she’s delighted. That’s 500 bucks. That’s 500 bucks more than she was
going to make doing something else, and it’s fun.” Well, “delighted”
might be pushing it. Pumping out ten assignments for the price of what many professional
freelancers charge for one will favor quantity over quality.
But if it all works—if Bionic Journalism can attract a massive audience and
save AOL—what’s the home run? Here Hansell gets a little bit ahead of
himself, but at least he is thinking big:
“It’s the most high risk improbable outcome, but the most exciting, which is that we
become the most dominant force in journalism, broadly defined, in the Twenty-First Century.
That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what Tim is shooting for. That’s
what I’m shooting for.”
And it all starts this weekend with 2,000 indie rock band interviews.
Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video curation platform that powers more than
68,000 web sites. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur and Emmy Award winning documentary
filmmaker. Watch his video notes of Saul Hansell talking about
Bionic Journalism and
AOL’s larger journalistic ambitions by clicking in the two previous links. .Follow
Steve on Twitter.
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The pot-heavy world
of the stoner comedy seems to be making a slow comeback. We've seen Anna Faris go on a stoned money
quest. We've seen Seth Rogen and James Franco get mixed up in business between drug lords and cops.
And now 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
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