New Home for Creative Voices on Open Salon

Tagged as: O.P.E.N.
Posted by: Kelly Mooney 

 

In an email sent to its Premium members recently, online news and entertainment site Salon.com announced that it wanted to do more for its greatest asset–its readers–by giving them a way to "create your own content, produce your own stories."

Ahh, how very Open of them. Now, they didn’t exactly hand over the keys to the Salon–they made a new set…for a new site. Yes, check out Open Salon, where "you make the headlines." The site is devoted to reader-contributed content, which site visitors can enjoy, comment on, tag, tip or share.

A few compelling aspects of Open Salon:

• Registration is fast and free
• You might make money off your posts (via peer-to-peer payments or "tips")
• For the less creative, the Open Call box tells you what type of stories they’re looking for each day (and what could get you featured on the homepage)

Open Salon is still in public beta, but from the looks of it, readers–er, writers–are pretty happy. There’s a bit of chatter about the reality of getting money for your work, but personally I’m intrigued by the idea and the execution.

I’m curious though about the decision to create a new property versus integrate its community writers with its staff writers–does this make them less Open? They do say that popular stories on Open Salon may get featured on Salon.com, though not sure what the frequency of that is.

Well, even if Salon isn’t Open, Open Salon is. Check it out. Open yourself up.

Tagged as: O.P.E.N.

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