Voices

Fwix Unveils Revenue-Sharing Plan for Hyperlocal Bloggers

An online news start-up is going where Google and other giants haven’t: sharing revenue with the people who write the news. Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level.

Voices

Live-Blogging the "Whither Journalism" Panel With Google, HuffPo, NYT and WSJ

It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit. Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Here Comes the Video Shakeout: Joost Scales Down, CEO Mike Volpi Steps Out

Here’s the beginning of the inevitable online video shakeout: Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival Google’s YouTube, is restructuring to focus on “white label” services, i.e., a back end for other video players. The site is laying off the majority of its 100-plus employees, and CEO Mike Volpi is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering.
volpi

AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid”

It’s been a bad week for the venerable news service aggregator, which seemed hell-bent on confusing everyone about its Internet strategy. Time to sit down with VP Jim Kennedy, who explains that the AP does indeed have a strategy.
newsies