Former Walrus staffer to launch online news site
January 30, 2009
- Posted by Regan Ray
A new "online forum for news and opinion" called The Mark is in development mode and is scheduled to launch this Spring.
Joshua Knelman is in the editor's chair of the ambitious project. Knelman, former associate editor, fiction editor and head of research at The Walrus, joins two other full-time staffers in creating The Mark.
Strategy consultant and MBA Jeff Anders is CEO and former Globe and Mail senior exec Ali Rahnema is publisher and COO.
The team is currently in the process of recruiting prominent Canadians to become contributors to the site. The recruitment material describes the Mark as:
"The Mark is Canada’s daily online forum for news and opinion. Every day it publishes 10-20 two-sentence briefs of the day’s most important news stories and associates related multimedia content to each summary: commentary and analysis written by subject matter experts; audio conversations and interviews with and between experts; video footage from conferences, speaker events and book launches; documentary films; links to other websites and more. Independent of the day’s news, The Mark will also feature the ideas of 5-10 thought-leaders through written, audio and video pieces. The Mark is a digital meeting place for the exchange of ideas."
The idea is that there are Canadians out there who are experts in their chosen field, but who don't consider themselves writers and so don't publish their opinions and or knowledge.
The project's goal is to gather a "network of 10,000 innovative Canadian thinkers and doers" and "disseminate their ideas to 1-million readers every month."
According to Anders, recruitment started at the end of January and "we have already signed on contributors numbering in the low hundreds, including former MPs, authors, academics, filmmakers, CEOs, NGO directors and more. The response has been overwhelmingly positive."
Anders, Knelman and Rahnema have been working on developing the project for almost a year, but Anders says they all left their "day" jobs about three or four months ago to work on The Mark full time.
|
I think that even if this project fails, it will be a valuable experiment. Journalism can be many different things; it doesn't have to be limited to the traditional model of paid quasi-professionals. This variation of participatory journalism can be part of a new mix that includes experts, citizens and traditional journalists.
Newspapers are in demise, but there will always be a place for trained journalists who adhere to a set of professional standards.
Nobody can claim to know exactly how journalism will change in this new era, so experimentation is essential. Bravo to the folks behind The Mark for having the guts to try something different.
"Charity excepted, the work you give away for free is worth exactly as much as what you are paid for it."--Carl Marks
Aw come on, Claude, don't be so cynical. Why not give them a chance?
And who, I wonder, are the notable Canadians who are "signing on" to work for nothing? Sounds like another in the growing list of examples of why serious journalism is undervaluing itself right into the grave. End Times indeed. (See reports of the impending demise of the NY Times print edition.)
It's worth noting that The Mark isn't paying its contributors, instead pitching itself as an opportunity for contributors to be published "for free" while graciously allowing those contributors to retain copyright to their own unpaid work.
(Okay, and in an amusing coincidence, the spam filter is asking me type in two words before allowing me to submit this post. The two words? Valuation and bitter. Makes me think the spam filter can read. And think.)