Front Desk

Welcome to the SmartNewsroom Beta Test site. Once formally launched, SmartNewsroom will provide publishers and editors with affordable, easy access to high quality content from freelance journalists across the nation — reporters, photographers, artists and designers. At the same time, SmartNewsroom provides freelance journalists with access to a national marketplace for their work , access that would be hard to reach on their own.

The need is there, the content is here — and SmartNewsroom brings them together. It will allow publishers to have access to content at a fraction of the cost of other services and sources — as low as $1 a download. How does that compare to the cost of each story from a wire service? At our paper, SmartNews, Fayetteville, NC, we pay an average of $25 per item that we use. But why should journalists be willing to sell the fruits of their labor for $1 or $5 per download? It doesn't sound like much if only one or a few newspapers use your material, but what if 100 do or 1,000 do? Pretty soon it becomes a worthwhile endeavor. How does that compare to the mere pennies that a typical wire service reporter gets for each time her story is used?

SmartNewsroom is in its infancy, and this Beta Testsite shows it. All e-commerce functions are disabled for now, many links are turned off, and the amount of material we have onboard is skimpy — for now. We are looking for 30 freelance journalists to participate in our initial tests. These 30 will be a mix of writers, photographers and artists whose work will help demonstrate what SmartNewsroom can do. Once we've accumulated a representative quantity and variety of material, we begin the next phase of our strategy — to unveil it to the publishing world. We like to call it Print Journalism 3.0. Stay tuned.

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