Allvoices.com’s community manager Paula Eaton recently sent an email to students at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism offering to pay them $10 per hour to post "short comments" on news stories published on the site.
Allvoices is a citizen journalism website that publishes news and comments from members of the community. It already has an “incentive program” that pays small amounts of money based on page views for user-generated news content. This, however, is the first time Allvoices has offered to pay for comments.
After examining the incentive program information on the site, I was unable to find payment for comments mentioned anywhere as part of the program. Instead, it seems Allvoices is privately asking for paid comments from journalists and students in order to give the appearance of reader participation on its site. It is unclear if they will separate paid comments from unpaid user-generated content.
The site clearly sees comments as being key to community engagement; one pop-up appeal says comments let readers "emotionally connect with other voices around the world through discussion and complete the human story." However, it's an underhanded way for a Web 2.0 community to build contributions, and runs the danger of betraying the trust of readers.
Disclosure: Chris Tompkins is a student at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and received the email as part of a solicitation which was received by all students at the school.
Comments
Chris, Thanks for writing about allvoices. As you know allvoices is a bottoms-up media company where everyone’s voice counts, from commenting to posting a story, video or an image around news.
We have an Excellence in Citizen Media Initiative where people get paid for their contributions (commenting is an extension of contribution).
So why are we asking specifically for commentators, we want great conversation starters on other people’s contributions, we are asking for help from students, who are thoughtful and have journalistic integrity to start conversations, we are in no way asking or paying them for a bias and they are free to comments on contributions that are of interest to them.
We are in the process of seeding the allvoices global community, and as you know the right community is always seeded, it does not appear on its own.
Thanks for your interest in allvoices
Amra Tareen CEO/founder allvoices.com
I don't see anything underhanded about it at all. allvoices is simply looking for people to comment on their stories - they are not asking for a particular bias. what's wrong with getting paid for your unbiased opinion. every sunday morning on network, journalists sit around the table offering up their opinions on a whole host of issues - no objectivity required. forget about fox where bias is a requirement. then there's 'reliable sources' on cnn where media comments on the media.
i'm sure all of these journalists are getting paid.
RP,
The problem is that comments are reflective of community activity. When a website, especially one that is VC funded, has to pay the community to interact, something is very wrong.
The problem appears to be All Voices isn't able to cultivate its own community. So it's doing things that seem underhanded and manipulative. Another example is there are users at Reddit who suspect Allvoices is spamming there:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/search?q=allvoices
Amra is right that communities are seeded. However, she doesn't seem to understand that seeding a community the right way means the founders are already deeply involved in an activity community, create an online community for it, and invite in others they know. It comes from a place of authenticity.
The underhanded charge is applicable here, because by paying people and spamming Reddit, it means the founders of Allvoices have no idea how to manage their community, cultivate an atmosphere of enthusiast users (because they aren't really enthusiast users themselves) who are so excited by the discussions that they want to be at Allvoices even if they aren't paid. Nor do the founders of Allvoices get that by paying people, they put themselves even further away from being in a position where they can make money than they would be if they didn't pay users to interact.
The model of paying your users to do things isn't sustainable, and you have to wonder if their VCs know that Allvoices is pumping up their numbers by paying users.
Anne
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