We support free expression in real time. As a contributor, you can publish whatever you like, whenever you like. Our platform treats all contributors equally – whether you’re a professional photographer, an essayist, or a tweeter.

We serve the public interest, not the agenda. That’s why we offer nothing less than complete editorial freedom and why the community chooses what content should be seen. We don’t decide what you should be interested in.

We challenge the status quo. We are not only non-partisan, but we allow new voices to challenge perspectives that have been entrenched by the traditional press. We believe in a fairer, more rounded picture of current affairs.

We encourage debate. There’s never one side to a story. We break down the one-way relationship between reader and reporter by giving you the tools to have your say and to hear what people really think about the biggest issues of the day.

We organised a stage last February in London to present two innovative startups, whose main purpose is the find a viable Business Model, while paying their contributors.

Imagine you’re launching a news platform. Imagine you’ve got the chance to design the platform from scratch. Imagine print had never existed. Imagine the digital age was the only one you’d ever known. Would you charge users for access? The answer should be ‘no’.

The problem, as shown by Matter, a long-form journalism platform that raised nearly three times its funding goal on Kickstarter and had to drop its paywall last year, is that even if you’ve got plenty of vocal supporters for your theoretical paywall, turning that support into hard cash is extremely challenging. In fact, it’s nigh on impossible for a mainstream news platform to enter the market and charge for access, which means any new blood will (and should) be free. The next big thing in news isn’t going to be hiding behind a paywall.

It’s a problem of inheritance. In the print era, newspapers could charge for their content because it was considered worth paying for, but even more importantly, you couldn’t get news for free. The news market was shattered by the birth of the internet and poor decision-making by newspapers themselves which scuppered their own businesses by offering their online content for free. The perceived value of news quickly evaporated.

According to the Digital News Report 2013 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 15% of people surveyed could ever see themselves paying for news. The commercial upside of launching a platform with a paywall is limited by the widespread reluctance to pay for news, while paywalls don’t make much sense from a journalistic perspective either because they limit your reach as a media organisation, yet more established titles are leaning towards paywalls. It is a sign of the lowly expectations of the news industry that the paywall launched by The Sun in 2013, for instance, instantly knocked 60% off its readership and was still described as a success.

Newspapers persist with paywalls for one reason – the idea that there isn’t a better alternative. Display advertising, once hoped to be the business model of choice for online news, only works for a handful of titles, but just because display advertising doesn’t work, doesn’t mean there aren’t any other solutions. Exciting, free journalism models are starting to emerge such as Contributoria, which is free to access but community-funded, Newsmodo, a site where freelancers get commissioned by publishers andVourno, a crowd-funding platform for video journalism.

News should be free – and not just from a commercial or media perspective. News should be free from an ethical standpoint. Although journalists should own the content they produce and should get paid for their work, society benefits as a whole when news content is accessible for free. It is a matter of public interest. It allows people to discover content they otherwise wouldn’t. It allows people to discover opinions they otherwise wouldn’t. It allows for a more open discussion about the biggest issues of the day. The more accessible news content is, the greater its reach, the greater its impact, the greater its benefit to society – but quality content can’t be produced unless journalists get paid for their work. News should be free. The question is how do you pay for it, and that’s a question we’re hoping to solve at The News Hub, a platform launching in April which will be free to access but pay contributors for good work.

William Stolerman is a journalist and the Founder of The News Hub, a crowd-sourced news platform where anyone can publish content and anyone can earn money for their content. The News Hub will be launching in April 2014.

William Stolerman presented The News Hub at the 2014 Polis Annual Journalism Conference.

Newspapers once led the news agenda, and in some countries they still do. But in recent years the extensive growth of digital journalism and platforms has meant information sharing has changed.

In 2014, that growth will continue.

Two decades ago the innovation of 24-hour news channels once herald the change from traditional news output to more conventional broadcast units.

But times have changed.

Whilst 24-hour news channels let us know what was happening all the time, led by CNN in 1990 during the first Gulf War, the role of the journalist and the way that news is broadcast is constantly evolving as technology does.

The dawn of the digital era asks some key questions:

How should news be gathered and reported?

Who can gather news?

Who can report news?

Are we relying less on traditional outlets?

In the last three years, the growth of mobile devices (especially smartphones) and social networks has given the audience an opportunity to be part of a new narrative, turning them not only into the viewers of news but the publishers, what could be termed ‘mini-broadcasters’.

Paul Grabowicz writing in Berkley.edu on the transition to digital journalism says:

“Blogs, mobile devices, social networks, microblogging and other digital tools have allowed people to publish their own stories and cover their own communities.”

This amateur publishing has been called many things. Some people don’t like the term ‘citizen journalist’, some prefer user-generated content, others like ‘audience participated’. The truth is, the audience is always part of the story in some way or another. But the tools we have nowadays allow the audience to be involved from the start.

One of the first instances of this type of amateur reporting were after the events of 9/11 - many of the first images emerging from the New York attacks were captured by onlookers. The recent riots in the UK, the Arab Spring and the typhoon in the Philippines show that ‘everyone’ is an eyewitness and much of the news content is no longer just captured by professional journalists. Newsrooms now know it is best to seek out and find those who can - from their personal experiences - help to share and tell the story.

Traditional media and broadcast media are slowly realising that the role of the audience is much more important than it was ten years ago.

New technology, social media and the dominance of smartphones gives the audience the opportunity to take hi res images and record good quality videos. And whilst 20 years ago we waited for the news channels to break news from correspondents on the ground or the newswires, new media has allowed one to spread the word quicker than any 24 news channel once thought it could do.

You should also read:

  It’s True We Really Are All Publishers Now

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/its-true-we-really-are-all-publishers-now-including-brands025/

When Everyone Is An Eye Witness What Is A Journalist