The faint announcement that Germany’s Netzeitung was seeking “20 million editors” has evolved into a new community publishing system that officially launched today. Readers Edition is at first glance a purely user-written news site. Registered users post what they like within given categories, and articles are displayed on the site with the help of community- and Web 2.0-like features.
The system looks like a mixture of several existing venues. First, it’s a bit like Korean citizen reporter site Ohmynews — no text goes online unedited. However, the “moderators” that are in charge of reading and fact checking are unsalaried super-users, not trained journalists. Also, it’s a bit like Digg, where published articles are posted in a “new articles” category only if at least 10 people have read them and left a positive evaluation. And finally, it’s a bit like a Google Maps mashup. (OK, not really. Only very few articles include maps yet.)
No one will get paid in this system, according to Netzeitung. Money from sponsors will be used to pay for server and hosting costs.
There are already some posts on the site within its six categories: politics, local, sport, Web and technique, economy and “mixed” (some articles appear in more than one category, which is a
little boring). Interestingly, the first featured articles were not written by “ordinary people.” To give the site a jump start, Netzeitung obviously recruited some well known German bloggers.
Day one of a new project. Will it survive and prosper?
