We posted last month about investing advice site The Motley Fool’s soon-to-launch blog network, which blog network president Roger Friedman told us at the time would include “handsome” compensation.

We’ve now got the details thanks to a memo from Friedman to the blog network.

In it, Friedman says that 200 people have already signed up to post, and he expects to get another 300 by Jan. 2, when the network officially launches.

He also breaks down the pay structure.

“Thoughtful, well-written” posts that make mention of publicly traded companies and their stock tickers will earn $50 each.

Those writers who have consistently high traffic “(if your 10 most recent entries average 2,500 sessions)” and who are viewed as “top-notch” by Fool staff will be paid $100 per entry.

This won’t pay the mortgage except for the absolute most prolific writers, but color us impressed—we’re looking forward to seeing how this experiment works out.

The full memo after the jump….

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LinkedIn has added some features to its CardMunch iPhone app. Now, instead of just turning a photo of a contact’s business card into a contact on your phone, you can also view that contact’s LinkedIn profile and learn all the usual things one learns by viewing a LinkedIn profile.

Why do people love Cardmunch so much? Apparently the accuracy is very high—as well it should be, as Cardmunch sends the images of the business cards to service providers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online “outsourcer” that matches workers up with menial online tasks. So every card you have transcribed has been looked at by a human being somewhere.

If you don’t have an iDevice, you have a few options:

BizCardArmy also has humans transcribe the cards, for between 15 and 25 cents per card, and is available on Android.

Evernote is free and uses OCR to turn cards into text, so accuracy may not be as high (especially if someone’s business card uses fancy fonts). But it’s free, and pretty badass.

The American Independent is consolidating all its news from seven state sites into one larger site, which has resulted in at least one layoff so far.

The Minnesota Independent was the first to announce the news publicly, with a post from American Independent founder David S. Bennahum.

“After five years of operation in Minnesota, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com,” Bennahum wrote. “This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms of journalism made available as technology has advanced, and an increasing emphasis on national coverage and issue-based coverage from our network. Over the coming months, AINN will announce a number of new journalism initiatives that will continue to advance our mission of producing impact journalism in the public interest.”

MN Independent reporter-editor Jon Collins has lost his job, he told MinnPost’s David Brauer, who had the MN Independent shutdown news first.

Similar (okay, totally identical) farewell messages have been posted to the websites of the Michigan Messenger and the New Mexico Independent. Nothing yet from Colorado, Florida, and Texas, where the American Independent Network also has sites.

The Washington Independent shut its doors nearly a year ago, citing financial problems.

After less than a year in the position, Ray Chelstowski is out as publisher of Newsweek/Daily Beast. Unrelatedly except for timing, executive editor Edward Felsenthal and managing editor Tom Weber have both resigned.

The news is coming from multiple reports in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and more.

PaidContent reports that Chelstowski will be replaced by Eric Danetz, joining from CBS Interactive.

Felsenthal, who served as a “buffer between staff and [Tina] Brown,” according to Adweek, had called his job “exhausting” two years ago, and told the NY Observer that NewsBeast management had been aware he was planning to resign “for months.” He’ll be replaced by Mark Miller, who worked for Newsweek from 1985 until last year when Newsweek was sold to the late Sidney Harman.

Managing editor Weber won’t be replaced.

SeekingAlpha, the financial news site that sort of kind of crowdsources its news, is paying out a decent amount of cash to its contributors, Talking Biz News reports.

Contributors who submit exclusive articles to SeekingAlpha can get paid $10 per thousand page views. Last quarter, 8,650 premium articles earned $486,000 in payouts, according to an email from CEO David Jackson obtained by Talking Biz News.

That’s an average of $55.49 per piece, but Jackson says there’s a wide range of earnings within the program.

There’s a wide variance of earnings: for some contributors, the payments are just a ‘nice have,’ while others are making serious money,” wrote Jackson.

The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011 is out. Despite the impossible-to-read charts and difficult navigation, we dug into the survey. After all, 40 percent of bloggers, including yours truly, consider themselves professionals. That’s a category worth watching.

Of that 40% of bloggers, Technorati divides the group into categories we find odd: professionals, corporate, and entrepreneur. While all af these categories are filled with bloggers trying to make money, the “professionals” blog to supplement their income, the corporate bloggers blog as part of their full-time job for a company, and entrepreneurs blog for a company they themselves own. Unsurprisingly, most of the full-time bloggers reported working at least 40 hours per week on the blog, while part-timers tended to blog somewhere between 1 and 10 hours a week. Most entrepreneurs spend 5 hours or less on their blog, which explains how the Seth Godins of the world have time to do everything besides blogging (they’re just really efficient at the blogging part).

Slightly more professional bloggers (either full or part-time) have a background in journalism, but 60-70 percent of all bloggers have no journalism background.

Bloggers in all but the “hobbyist” (no money) category agreed that blogging has advanced their career, that they’ve made friends through blogging, and that their blog has opened up other professional opportunities. Most said they planned to blog more frequently or write a book. A book! Everyone knows there’s no money in publishing, you sillies!

The Daily Beast might be on track to be profitable this year, but the Newsweek part of the NewsBeast combo isn’t looking as good: Newsweek is estimated to have lost $20 million this year. So getting the combined Newsbeast into profitability by 2013, which owner Barry Diller says is possible, will be a “daunting” task, says Adweek’s Lucia Moses.

Newsweek is using some non-confidence-inspiring tactics in an effort to shore up readership: providing what are known as post-expiration copies, or grace copies, for example. That means that the magazine has been sending issues to people whose subscriptions have lapsed, a tactic magazines use when they’re having trouble reaching their promised circulation. But in a June report, nearly 5 percent of Newsweek’s subscriptions were grace copies, a number media buyers say is far too high. Meanwhile, print circulation is down despite the cost of those subscriptions being deeply discounted.

Traffic online is down, too. In short, it’s not looking good for NewsBeast. But if the company can’t increase revenue, it’s going to have to cut costs. Moses estimates that saving the money Tina Brown needs will require cutting half the staff. Yikes.

The Washington Post has created the new position of Chief Experience Officer and promoted Laura Evans from chief researcher to fill the post.

New products and major changes to existing products will require approval of the CXO, according to publisher Katharine Weymouth, to whom Evans will report directly.

“Today, we have scores of products that touch our customers in myriad ways—ranging from our flagship newspaper to our growing suite of mobile apps,” Weymouth said in a memo to staff. “We must understand the customer experience across and within all of these and other platforms. That understanding must be guided by accurate data and expert analysis of those
data. In this regard, the CXO role is a natural extension of Laura’s previous role, where she worked with key leaders across the company to guide our consumer-related decisions with a deeper understanding, based on research and data, of our customers’ behavior, preferences, and interests.”

“Going forward, our CXO will be regularly involved at the beginning of the [product design] process—setting priorities, guiding concepts and testing ideas. This process and structure will take us out of the realm of personal biases and opinions and into the realm of the best-run product companies—where products are launched and iterated based on metrics, data and user feedback.”

In other words, the Post is trying to make itself more like Google, or Apple. We’ve gotta say, this sounds like a pretty clever idea to us.

[Source: Romenesko]

We had reached out to the Huffington Post Union of Bloggers to ask what would happen to the site now that the National Writers Union had ended its boycott against the HuffPost.

The response we got, from someone just signing his/her name as “HPUB,” cleared up a few things: despite being “affiliated” with the National Writers Union local that was leading the boycott, the HPUB isn’t going to be affected.

In short, the HPUB has bigger concerns than the boycott (though it believes, too, that the bloggers should have been paid). The HPUB’s problem is that the Huffington Post isn’t what it used to be.

“HPUB” also called the AOL sale a “coup” and “shameful” and called the HuffPost “ruined forever.” Them’s fighting words!

Here’s the full response, after the jump:

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The National Writers Union and the Newspaper Guild-CWA are ending their boycott of the Huffington Post, which was launched in March and asked writers to stop writing for free on Arianna’s site.

As may be painfully clear by looking at the Huffington Post, not many writers withheld their work. (Although some of them did launch HuffingtonPostUnionofBloggers, which had the distinction of also not paying writers for their work, but without a CEO who could sell the property to AOL for millions. We’ve reached out to HPUB to find out what will happen to the site now.)Update: Despite a statement on HPUB saying that the site is affiliated with the same chapter of the National Writers Union that had been leading the boycott, HPUB was and is not related to the boycott. More TK…

At any rate, the NWU announced today it is ending the boycott—Romenesko has the press release—and the Newspaper Guild published a similar announcement Thursday.

We have asked, from the beginning, that Arianna Huffington and her staff meet with us to discuss the need for a model that compensates journalists for their efforts. Such meetings have now taken place, and the company has publicly pledged to work with us to resolve our differences.
We are pleased to see HuffPost leaders stating so clearly the importance of paid journalism, not only to our society as a whole, but to their own business model.
Now that we’ve opened a dialog with HuffPost, it makes sense to us to set aside the boycott as we attempt to work together and move forward. There is no single, clear cut answer to what constitutes an acceptable unpaid op/ed piece, when casual commentary crosses the line into researched analysis, or when a discussion about ideas becomes an “assignment.” These issues will need to be monitored and reassessed continually, and we think that can best happen by building a constructive relationship with HuffPost. However you feel about the Huffington Post, they are clearly a major player in emerging models of online journalism.

The end to the boycott does not affect the lawsuit led by Jonathan Tasini, the Newspaper Guild said. That suit is still ongoing.