Weber Shandwick Social Studies Blog

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.

We’re a company founded by bloggers, and we’ve supported online journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we’ve put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence.

In summary, the program is offering journalists their own online publishing/branding package, including the following:

• A free Pro-level blog account
• Participation in TypePad’s advertising program, with a revenue split
• Promotion on TypePad’s Blogs.com directory site
• Additional opportunities for visibility and linking

While Six Apart claims to have received an “overwhelming” response and a “flood of submissions,” others were less-than-enthused by what they saw as nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy. “I’m sure that will be very helpful in trying to feed your family,” deadpanned Jemima Kiss, who blogs for the UK newspaper The Guardian. Paul Boutin at Valleywag was more cynical and pointed in his take:

You get to keep a few pennies of the couple of bucks per month Six Apart will make from ads they’ll run on your blog. Most important, the inept, self-aggrandizing management team at Six Apart gets to brag about all the storied journalists they’ve now got blogging for them.

And Graham at the Entrecard blog worries about the inadequacy of this “let them eat blogs” approach against the backdrop of the “death of print journalism”:

Forgive me for being cynical, but a free Typepad blog isn’t going to do anything to save the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of journalists caught up in, or soon to be caught up in, the death of print journalism. I can’t blame them for running their company, and marketing it effectively, but something at the heart of this crisis is eating away at me.

Where will all these journalists go? This is just the tip of the ice berg. Analysts are giving print newspapers 5 years. In the next five years, so many journalists are going to lose their jobs that it will be staggering. But there won’t be anywhere for them to go…

[...] The true benefits of journalism, and what sets it apart from a free blog you set up on the internet with two clicks, is that it’s backed by a healthy business with important infrastructure in place to receive new tips, report news factually and accurately, and be held accountable for any facts they publish. Blogs in their current models simply do not support that, and 90% of bloggers care much more about controversy than factual and balanced reporting. After all, controversy generates page views and visits and viral traffic. Why be fair balanced and accurate when controversy will drive your blog to new heights?

No question that Six Apart’s “bailout” is not purely altruistic; it’s also intended to expand the company’s base of bloggers with an influx of professional journalists, while providing more screen real estate for its ads. Six Apart’s management team has been lambasted by critics for packaging this marketing move as a way of helping laid-off journalists. SixApart VP/blogger/evangelist Anil Dash, who conceived the original bailout program, acknowledges that it’s not a panacea, even as he defends its value in a post entitled “TypePad and Journalism:”

The mood of the emails we’ve gotten has ranged from hopeful to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere….I know that journalists are a skeptical bunch, so I’m not trying to bullshit anyone: The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to single-handedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won’t be able to accept every application at first. But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online.

Let’s be real here: Six Apart’s so-called bailout program for journalists is not a replacement for a lost job, nor is it a social program. It’s a savvy marketing move that does in fact provide a vehicle for out-of-work journalists to brand themselves and showcase their writing. Six Apart might have been a little more transparent in its initial roll out in acknowledging how the program furthers its own business goals in the bargain, but even so, it’s fairly evident that it’s intended as a classic business win-win. Nothing wrong with that (assuming there’s nothing hidden in the fine print).

And the fact remains that Six Apart is providing free blogging accounts and an opportunity to participate in an advertising revenue split. Journalists who see little value in that will not take the company up on its offer, but hundreds have apparently already eagerly done so. It will be interesting to see how many of them embrace their new roles as citizen journalists – and whether it helps pay any of the bills.