New Media

This showed up in our inbox today, oddly enough labeled "contest," although if you're honest with yourself, isn't every job a contest between you and the thousands of other applicants?

Either way: Flavorpill, the daily newsletter of fun things to do in your hometown, is opening up a branch in Melbourne, Australia and looking for a managing editor to oversee their content. Unfortunately, you don't just have to be hip and cool to apply for this job, you also have to fit into a predetermined age range of 18-30, which would seem to go against the Age Discrimination in Employment act of 1967, but Australia's passing of a similar bill only happened 5 years ago, and is a little more lax about pigeonholing their employees. Unfortunately, Flavorpill's HQ is based in New York, meaning if someone wanted to take the the company to court over not getting the Melbourne position, they might have a fair shot at the case.

Unless by calling it a contest, instead of a job opening, the daily listings guide has found a way to bypass that tiny little hiccup.

Any HR gurus or employment attorneys out there want to weigh in?

Today's launch of Gawker.TV is the product of Richard Blakeley's three years as Nick Denton's video editor. Now the This Is Why You're Fat co-author is manning his own satellite site, which will be posting videos throughout the day, with the help of the 16 or so interns currently working under Blakeley.

The fact that so much (unpaid) manpower is going into this spin-off site isn't exactly a surprise. Gawker's largest-generating posts have almost always been candid videos: Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology, the Eric Dane/Rebecca Gayheart/Kari Ann Peniche sex tape, and the video shot by Blakeley of Heath Ledger's body being wheeled out of the apartment he was staying in Soho when he died in 2008.

Denton has also admitted that it will be easier to sell ads on a site that is not as specifically themed as some of his other off-shoots like Jezebel (for women) or Fleshbot (Gawker's sex Web site). Sales of Gawker's other sites -- Wonkette, Idolator, and Gridskipper -- were similarly explained to be the result of poor ad revenue.

Gawker.TV currently has a tip box at the top of the site for users to submit videos. We have yet to hear back from Gawker Media if the tip box will automatically filter into the new open forums, as they do on Gawker's main site.

See More: Gawker.TV

News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal is pretty confident about the choices its made in regards to selling content on the Web. It was one of the first pubs to put its articles behind a pay wall, a system that's now being seen as the only option by papers such as Newsday.

But when it comes to iPhone applications, The Wall Street Journal seemed surprisingly lackadaisical about making their users pay to read the news on their phones, by first launching a free version of its site as an app back in April.

Of course, all good things must end, and that includes Wall Street Journal's "free" iPhone content. In September, WSJ.com announced that it would be charging users either $2 or $1 a week (depending on whether readers were actually subscribed to the print version of The Wall Street Journal) for a subscription on their mobile device. Still though, the application would be "free" to download...you'd just have to pay to get any service on it.

This "offering you a free lunch and then taking it away" is not a new business plan, even for the Web. And today's announcement of a free Wall Street Journal "MarketWatch.com" application, which lets you check your stocks, get real-time updates on the ticker index and has a customized feature for companies seems like just another gimmick to get smartphone users dependent on WSJ's online services before making them pay. On the other hand, several publications offer certain columns or content for free in the form of applications, without giving away the entire publication to download. Sort of a tiny taste to get your mouth wet, so you'll buy the subscription cost at a monthly charge.

Either way, we wouldn't get too comfortable with MarketWatch's new free app. You might just end up paying more than you bargained for.

The Texas Tribune, a new Texas-based non-profit journalism Web site, will launch tomorrow -- one year before the state's 2010 general election, which includes the gubernatorial race, among others. There has been a lot of talk about the project since longtime Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith left his day job to launch the Tribune, and even though it will cover only Texas political and policy news, we here at FishbowlNY are fascinated by the prospect of non-profit journalism no matter where its based.

The project is was founded by Texas-based venture capitalist John Thornton. Smith, who believed in Thornton's vision from the beginning, was helping to look for a suitable editor-in-chief for the site before realizing that he would make the perfect leader. "It was sort of like Dick Cheney helping George Bush find a vice president," Smith said. The team went on to hire a staff of eleven reporters, plucked from the top echelons of Texas' political journalism world.

"We hired the best reporters away from for-profit journalism in Texas," Smith said. "We put together our fantasy football list, and we got everybody we wanted."

The Texas Tribune (www.texastribune.org) will be unlike any other non-profit journalism organization. In addition to traditional news reporting, there will be columns, blogs aggregating content from other news sources, original audio and original video content, all available for free for newspapers, radio and television stations to use. There will also be 80 gigabytes of public information, like data about Texas' elected officials, that the Tribune assembled into databases for the public to access. "I'm kind of amazed that in just a couple of months we've been able to build this with a relatively small staff," Smith said.

As he prepared to reveal The Texas Tribune to the world, Smith took a minute to talk to FBNY about his reason for leaving Texas Monthly to start the new project, how he's worked to fund it and what the reaction from the Texas journalism community has been so far.

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The FCC has named Steven Waldman as an adviser to the chairman in its office of strategic planning. According to MediaWeek, Waldman will "lead an open, fact-finding process to study the impact of technology and a weakened economy on the future of media, and make policy recommendations."

If these policy recommendations have anything to do with the FCC's recent proposed Net Neutrality Principles outlined by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski last month, Waldman's past job experience puts him in a good position to weigh both sides of the argument for new Internet regulations.

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Well here is finally some good news for print journalism: Godengo, a magazine-to-website service platform has raised $2.16 million in funding for continuing project development.

The Silicon Valley company uses a publishing system that is completely browser-based, meaning that you're not just uploading your magazines' text onto a Web site and letting readers engage the same way they would a print version. Instead, Gondengo also brings applications to the table, allowing publishers to interact with their readership in an entirely new way: whether it's polls, message boards, calendars, or comments.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Any great blog with an active readership has implemented many of those features two years ago, with the whole Web 2.0 boom. But it's encouraging to see print publications being offered a system that could let them compete with their Web-based competitors without having to sacrifice their original content. Let's just see if Gondengo can make good on the advertising revenue side of its program, where inevitably all publications, print and Web, are groping around blindly, waiting to strike gold.

For a countering viewpoint, Alarm Clock has a more skeptical reaction: Magazine Site Publisher Godengo Raises $2.1M

The Innovation International Media Consulting group, like other media consultancies, used to have a place in the media field. It was not unusual for papers or magazines to bring in outside agents to help identify issues and drive content, with an emphasis on marketing strategies and advertising. And it's also not unheard of in publishing to have consultants push editorial in a certain direction to maximize readership. None of this is new business.

What is new, however, is when consulting companies like Innovation decide to rebrand themselves as a news org, without creating a clear distinction between their marketing services (and the clients who may have this company on their payroll), and objective journalism. Then things start to get a little bit complicated.

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Last week, The Huffington Post launched a new philanthropically focused vertical, HuffPost Impact, and this week Tina Brown's online publication The Daily Beast unveiled a socially conscious page of its own: Giving Beast.

Just as HuffPost paired with Causecast.org, Daily Beast has launched Giving Beast in partnership with Global Philanthropy Group. The site currently features stories about important social issues like Nicole Kidman's support for the International Violence Against Women Act and the experiences of Afghan businesswomen. The articles include links to non-profit organizations supporting the causes described, like the United Nation's Development Fund for Women.

Earlier this week, Arianna Huffington told FishbowlNY that it was more important than ever for Americans to work together, support each other and build communities. From the looks of Giving Beast, it seems like Brown would agree.

What do you think? Do you want to read about causes and philanthropy?

Related: Huffington On HuffPost's Impact Vertical

This morning we noticed something strange: a Gawker post written by someone named The Business Insider. Some digging revealed the exact same post written by Nicholas Carlson, a former Gawker employee, on Business Insider's Silicon Alley Insider.

Carlson confirmed to FishbowlNY that this article -- which cites an anonymous source claiming AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore met recently to discuss a join spin-off of Time Warner -- was part of a new partnership between the two Web companies. The article's subject matter and tone make it a perfect pick up for Gawker, and we're told this is the first time the site has republished a Business Insider story, although TBI has been picking up Gawker pieces since last month.

Now the question remains, beyond clicks, is there any other benefit to either side in sharing content?

Related: Gawker Launches Open Forums

Last week, The Huffington Post launched a new socially conscious vertical, HuffPost Impact. The new section of the online pub, launched in partnership with Causecast.org, features cause-related news and opinion, with many stories including a call to action that connects readers to ways to donate time or money.

For example, during its launch week, HuffPost featured a story on its homepage about Monique Zimmerman-Stein, "a mother who shares a rare genetic disorder with her children that causes blindness." Rising medical bills forced Monique to sacrifice her own sight to save her daughters'. Huffington Post readers responded to the call to donate to the family, and the site raised over $30,000 in a matter of days.

"This has been a passion of mine for many years," HuffPost editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington told FishbowlNY in an interview yesterday. "Back when I was living in Washington in the early '90s I pitched the idea of creating a CSPAN3 because I thought we needed to have a 24/7 outlet to cover what is happen in communities, that can cover nonprofits and people giving money. At the time it wasn't clear the that the Internet was going to be the place where people would get their news 24 hours a day."

Huffington has extended this idea of 24/7 cause-related news to HuffPost, where anyone looking to donate to a cause -- or simply learn more about it -- can search the site any time of day. AllforGood.org, which claims Huffington as a board member, is helping power cause searching on the section.

More of our interview with Huffington, after the jump

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