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Alfred Hermida of Reportr.net and a Professor of Journalism at UBC accuses that Orato.com Turns its Back on Citizen Journalism, citing a term that we agree is misunderstood and controversial at best and passe at worst. He contends that content submitted by citizens but edited by a site’s staff, as it is on our site, is not strictly citizen journalism as it was originally conceived nor as he perceives it is meant to be appreciated now. Furthermore, he contends that the alteration and mediation of content by professional publishing intermediaries, with or without the citizen’s involvement, is counter to the raw, spontaneous, intimate and immediate nature of the media experiment. What follows are points of clarification, rebuttal and discussion to inspire the same in readers.
Citizens are still the source of 95% of Orato’s content. What has changed between Orato 1.0 and 2.0 is our business model and editorial mandate in that now, instead of paying some of the writers some of the time, we pay all of the writers all of the time, offer them free 1-on-1 editorial and Web training and, as a result of higher quality and better optimized content, we deliver them larger audiences. It’s an exchange 800+ writers have accepted and with which few quibble. This affords the leverage Orato needs to compete in a tough marketplace and grow organically.
Orato’s first incarnation, in essence a collective, unedited multi-author blog, incurred significant debt and would have ended in demise - a sadder state surely than what Hermida is lamenting now. Instead, we’ve moved to a model that is viable in the long term and mutually lucrative– we share the risk and the revenue with the writer and amass evergreen content that will earn both parties long tail dividends. If that means citizen journalist purists think we’ve lost our edge, then they’re welcome to find a better fit elsewhere or post for free on Wordpress or Blogger or YouTube and become publishers themselves in the time it takes to log on, interference free.
I would fear for the freedom of speech citizen journalism has come to stand for if, in fact, showcases for it were scarce or costly, but we are not living in an era of scarcity in this regard. Quite the contrary, the vast majority of the Web is made up of these venues sans gatekeeper; more haystack than needles. What is rare is professionally-edited but unsolicited, unassigned paid work for amateur and self-defined journalists-in-training. Orato offers this unique combination to both amateur writers as well as veteran journalists new to the Web and is alive and innovating today because it tries to be all needles no hay.
We respect the fact that impatient but discerning readers don’t have time to indulge the rough cut of most unedited citizen journalism posts. Orato edits to insure titles are transparent and articles are found by searchers at Google. We edit to focus content, to attribute facts and quotes, to squash slander, racism and sexism, to improve accompanying visuals, to add helpful links, and to make the page easily scanable by browsers in a hurry who won’t sift through multi-page rants or meandering naval-gazing. We don’t surgically remove the soul of the article - changes are largely cosmetic and done in concert with writers who sign off on the final version even as it’s live on the site.
It’s a truism to say the Internet has evolved faster than traditional media ownership, as the current sea change and print and broadcast layoffs indicate - you have to be fleet-footed to stay alive. Orato chose to survive by adopting a pro-am model, allowing both professionals and amateurs, ie citizens, working side by side on the same site rather than separate sites co-mingling on the Web. We’re a hybrid, the 2009 iteration of a phenomenon that had its start at the turn of the millennium.
Orato is one of several venues that offers a level playing field and an open door (no application and post live), but once writers post they need to be responsible for their material and adhere to the conventions of the craft. Credibility isn’t won just by being there first, it means being right. Readers value reliability and trustworthiness, which doesn’t only come in the guise of a multinational chain of papers or a nationally-owned broadcaster – we are attempting to supplement that very valuable reporting with increasingly valuable and in-demand material that speaks from experience, Orato’s tagline.
Orato’s articles are still rooted in intimate experience, still manifest the ways in which the news plays out in the lives of citizens, more feature or column material than breaking news or current affairs yet journalism all the same, but we reserve the right to edit these articles in exchange for professional advice, pay and publication. We haven’t turned our back on citizen journalism, we’ve reinvented it.
Orato Media Corp. 525 Seymour St, Vancouver, BC V6B 3H7, Canada Phone: +1-604.331.7468 Fax: +1-604.689.3009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Orato.com Hiring and Training Journalists in Wake of Media Layoffs
May 25, 2009 Vancouver’s Orato.com, a forward-thinking online magazine with the tagline “speak from experience” written by both professional and amateur “Correspondents,” officially re-launched its press and recruitment ad campaign today with an eye to attracting both novice (students and recent graduates) and veteran journalists looking to expand their employment options in the current economic environment.
According to Paper Cuts, nearly 25,000 jobs have been lost in the print sector since 2008, leaving a considerable number of talented and trained personnel looking to extend reporting skills to cyberspace for pay. While newspapers and magazines consider survival strategies in the wake of media attrition, Orato’s owner Sam Yehia says, “We are positioning ourselves as a competitive and attractive client for reporters who want to add Search Engine Optimization and Web writing to their arsenal of skills as freelancers looking for income online.”
The site has been online since June 2006, but with a new management team as of January it completely re-imagined its editorial vision, design and business model. The new iteration puts journalists first and offers a potent combination of features its competition does not:
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler says, “Orato today launched an aggressive Google Adwords campaign to build upong its existing roster of 750 writers. We will grow content and traffic to reward Correspondents with both pay and profile. They post video, audio, photos and articles live; our editors review the material in 24 hours; readers learn at a glance, and our writers earn from the first ad click. We hope those in search of a value-added training will consider us a vital new client in the freelance marketplace.” For a glance at Orato’s FAQ or Content Guidelines, visit the site.
About Orato.com
Orato means “I speak” in Latin, a moniker that aptly describes how Correspondents tell audiences about newsworthy experiences and offer trustworthy information and verifiable sources for those in search of reliable reporting. Orato is hiring writers who are participating in, as well as observing, the activities they cover, making them genuine experts with knowledge to share. The Vancouver-based magazine has been online since June 2006 and is privately owned by Sam Yehia. Staff profiles are available online.
Contact Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler, at editor@orato.com or 604.608.1070 for more information. -30-
No one in the audience in Washington, or around the world, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated and in his many press conferences in the first 100 days of office, could have escaped hearing virtually every network commentator repeatedly exclaim about the President’s “powers as an orator”. It is an interesting choice of words that didn’t escape our notice here at Orato, borrowing as we have from that word’s Latin origins, which translate to “I speak” and our namesake.
Regardless of your political leanings, its use in reference to Obama’s rousing powers as a rhetorician begs further exploration, for the word invokes other slightly more nuanced synonyms that equally apply: pontificator, witness, testifier, beholder, observer, spectator.
All imply an immediacy combined with sober second thought, a presence that appreciates an event through the filter of our own experience, expertise, and reason. No description could be a more apt approximation of Orato’s mandate, a post-millennial extension of that meaning forged hundreds of years earlier and epitomized in Obama’s address.
In the face of accusations that the Web is the playground of the illiterate, a space in which the well-chosen phrase, the thrill of an articulate argument perfectly espoused, and the rising tide of a dramatic build to an emotional climax is all but extinct, the media’s adoption of an old-fashioned word to define a man who’s new fashion was to harness the Internet is a timely reminder that the medium has changed, but the message can still bear the signs of true craftsmanship. Even McLuhan would have liked this post-modern spin on his famous quotation, and as for us, well Orato would happily be the home to 2009’s orators in this tradition.
More often than not, the 21-year-old intern, frustrated with the glacial rate of change in-house at established book and magazine publishers, pipes up at a meeting and says, outrageously and not without repercussions, “What about a podcast on youTube? What about an author drop-in on Second Life? What about a text-a-thon with the 12-15 set on Myspace?” only to be met with glazed expressions and eye-rolling from the 30-40-something marketing department that assumes this costs too much of the green and will take nothing short of a Peter Jackson- style orchestration to pull off.
How wrong they are. With a username, a game plan, digital camera, and a healthy dose of mischief all of this can be accomplished in a few hours to reach thousands and best of all, you can do it here on Orato and it’s trackable. The Web is one of the few places live stats about usage from pageviews, to screen time, to referring sites, to click-through rates can be on hand in an instant (careful, can cause screen blindness from overuse).
Rather than rely on instinct and a focus group that includes your mother, why aren’t more writers and publishers thinking about partner sites like Orato as home for their print content in new form (you name it, it’s there) to see what the bait draws?
Sites with higher page rank, more content, longer histories, and highly-optimized pages are a better magnet for drawing search or direct load traffic than the standard catalogue-plus-shopping-cart construction most presses and magazines have on offer to push subscription or e-commerce.
This is no time for proprietary stake holding, traditional publishers need to think outside the spine and get out there and share – and we don’t mean a free bookmark. Holding on to electronic rights that are never fully exploited or take too long to sell cost you valuable time and money for content that could be read, sold, and recommended faster than you can say social networking.
Nobody does a better job of finding and developing the talent than the editorial teams at respected book and magazine publishers, but let’s face it, marketing has always been an afterthought and an uphill battle for all but the already best-selling and megabrands.
Democracy has come to the Net and now the beloved but overlooked story deep in the mid or backlist or archive issue can find its readers again and again by making the expertise readily available one article, video, or listen at a time.
Think I’m all talk? Post a comment about your success stories here and prove me right. For that matter, post your failures and tell me what you’d have done differently. I’d venture to say most worthy works in print don’t get thousands of pageviews a day on Amazon or the publisher site, but an article that’s relevant, timely, and plain-speaking when you just need to know – I’ll take that, with the book to go.
Since Gutenberg, print publishers have excelled at finding and developing editorial talent and producing books that feed the need for both art and information. So why haven’t audiences and sales registered their appreciation at the till? While there are a myriad of factors that contribute to the complexity of the book industry, if we were really honest we’d admit that we’re better at making books than selling them.
Meanwhile, the explosion of the Web and its huge but fractured audience has made individual contact with existing and potential readers possible at the stroke of a key, but the Net’s reputation as a medium that consistently has more weak than strong editorial content, leaves readers at loose ends as they search for needles in haystacks. Consider what would happen if these two industries joined forces to share content and market without sacrificing brand and ownership.
Publishers with thousands of titles and professional and expert writers have no shortage of content, but can’t afford to rely on the whimsy, discounts, returns policies, poor exchange rate, and short shelf life of just traditional stores and an abbreviated season to recoup their costs and get the word out.
Online sites are so desperate for content they’re relying on aggregated and anonymous content from questionable sources to draw readers and advertisers. Can these two industries scratch each other’s backs and finally offer readers of both formats what they need and want?
Of course they can, if they’d just talk to each other. A little liaising, an open mind, the right contractual agreements and some imagination - territorialism parked at the door - would go a long way to making online content stronger and book sales more robust.
In this age of “everyone-has-a-blog” in which we are invited to espouse every private thought, rant, or happening in a stream-of-consciousness constant outpouring, (and thank freedom of expression for it, in its place) what the media world does NOT need is another publication that offers a collective version of same.
Unmediated , unedited indulgences of every predictable whim from a fascination with nudity and sex (blacklisted by Google Adsense and therefore that does not pay the author) to bad reality TV and tabloid journalism’s obsessions with faux celebrity wannabes is the stuff of diaries or email, but not public, professional space that gleans notoriety precisely because it’s a harder club to get into. Scarcity drives value and one thing pure opinion is not is scarce. Educated opinion, yes.
The vast majority of writers I know - and there is an ever-lengthening line thanks to the drastic, if somewhat predictable, layoffs at newspaper dailies, magazines, book publishers and every form of electronic media except online – want something much more elusive than a bigger version of their Blogger or Wordpress site with no barrier to entry– they want:
AND have the benefits afforded most online journalists but with a twist:
So to those who question the deliberate and informed changes on Orato, or are unaware what tinkering behind the curtain will unveil when it arises, we invite both patience and anticipation. In a few weeks we’ll launch a site virtually unrecognizable in its stunning design (with photo slideshow and video in a single frame), but true to the writer’s golden rule – if you’re going to spend hours researching and writing something worthy of byline, you want to sell it to someone who can deliver an audience who stays long enough to read it and pay for it.
As any Web professional worth her salt knows, 80% of audiences don’t click to a second page of a story or scroll much below the fold and without a title that will ensure it’s found by search engines sending 95% of traffic to that article, why bother? Your friends already know you’ve posted it – they don’t count.
Citizen journalism has been alive and well long before Orato and is now as plentiful as bandwidth, as are the awards these sites give each other, but the real award worth earning is readership and that’s why the new Orato will print all the news that’s fit and not all that will fit.
