Posts Tagged ‘Eric Zorn’

Sawhorse Media, the guys behind the Shorty Awards, launched a new site this afternoon called Muck Rack, which follows leading journalists’ Twitter feeds.

Asking the question, “What if you could get tomorrow’s newspaper today?” the site simply aggregates the Tweets of popular journalists including ABC’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s David Gregory, The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn and AirAmerica’s Ana Marie Cox.

The thinking goes, what these journalists are Tweeting right now, is the news that will appear in their online piece or broadcast story. Or maybe you’ll just learn what they had for lunch.

The site separates the journalists into the companies they work for, allows you to reply and retweet and has adds links to their Websites. You can also recommend reporters that should be followed on the site.

So far, in it’s two-hour old life, there’s no advertising, but if you read into Sawhorse Media CEO Greg Galant‘s Tweet – “Thanks! We hope to get rich slowly doing it” – that could soon come.

Chicago Tribune colummist Eric Zorn has a suggestion about how to keep the newspaper business, in business.

I’m now a believer in the cable TV model. News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives and other offerings.

For, say, $10 a month, a subscriber would have a choice of, say, 50 participating local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Another $5 might buy an additional 50 outlets, and so on.

Why the bundling? Because the online subscription model doesn’t work for most individual media companies. Readers just browse over to similar, free sites to avoid the hassle and the expense, however minor.

Why not try a pay-per-click model instead? Same reason.

It’s a great idea. Maybe one of the new visionaries at Zorn’s employer will take him up on it…once they emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.