Number of Unpaid Journalists Increasing

I love I WANT MEDIA. Sure, it’s very old-school: A simple website with an e-mail newsletter supported by ads. No RSS feed, nothing fancy. Just a daily baleen-filter of news about the media industry, curated by New York media guy Patrick Phillips.

Today I thought I’d share a game I play with I WANT MEDIA. The larger story about the media business is pretty well known: Traditional media wallows in a sinking tarpit, new media of suspect intent and value scramble for traction. Essentially this story is told over and over in I WANT MEDIA, often on the same day. Only the details change.

To take one easy example from today:

Link 1: CBS Launches Site For Citizen Journalists

CBS is opening a citizen journalism Web site, CBSEyeMobile.com, where users can upload video and images of news events from their mobile phones.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/04/15/cbs-trying-hand-at-citizen-journalism

Link 2: NY Times Expects to Cut Newsroom Jobs

The New York Times is informing the newsroom that it will probably resort to layoffs to reduce head count, as the deadline for voluntary buyouts looms.

http://www.observer.com/2008/times-we-expect-layoffs

See what I mean? Different victims, different perps, same story.

Now here’s the challenge: To write a single headline that could sit on top of either story. My suggestion for today is the headline I used for this blog entry.

The game’s a sort of dark-humor version of a funny caption contest. Call it a not-funny caption contest.

A waste of time? Sure. But no worse than Twitter.

Plus, it gives unpaid journalists something to do.

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