Ex-Naples Daily News reporters launch site ‘to put journalists back to work’

Cathy Zollo

Gina Edwards

Gina Edwards picked the brains of many an entrepreneur in her 10 years as a business and investigative journalist at the Naples Daily News in Florida. Now, she and another former Daily News reporter have become entrepreneurs themselves “to put journalists back to work.”

After three years of development, Edwards and business partner Cathy Zollo will soon launch WatchdogCity.com, a site where journalists can sell access to their stories to individual news consumers for 99 cents and up.  Edwards said the site, on which a patent is pending, will not allow the news consumer to share the information with others without paying the journalist. The consumer has 30 days to access the story once purchased.

“I still want to work as a reporter. We built it for ourselves,” said Edwards, 38, who left the paper in 2006 to pursue the project and started a private investigative agency “to pay the bills.” Zollo, 50, who had moved on to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune as an environmental reporter, was laid off from there in 2009 and also became a PI.

“We’ve been heartsick to see colleagues let go, and really good reporters leaving the field. The freelance rates are painfully low. This is a way for journalists to take their work directly to the public,” Edwards said. “We really believe people will pay for quality work.”

She said reporters, producers, photographers and videographers who want to offer work for sale on the site must pledge to uphold a code of ethics, based on guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of News Editors and major news organizations. News consumers will have the opportunity to rate journalists’ credibility against criteria in the Watchdog City code. The aggregated ratings for journalists will show up publicly as they do for private sellers in Amazon.com.

A separate part of the site will host bloggers, who will have different criteria for their credibility ratings. Bloggers do not have to subscribe to the journalists’ code of ethics for the site, but they must agree not to plagiarize or violate copyright law.

She declined to disclose the partners’ investment in the site; they will take a 20 percent commission on any fees earned. She said they have no idea what a journalist might be able to make by selling their work on the site. “We haven’t found anyone doing anything like this,” she said.

Consumers can sort news on the site by subject or geography. “Journalists in their own community are a trusted brand. They already have a following. We’ve built this as a tool where they can reach out to those who know them,” Edwards said.

Former Minneapolis Star Tribune editor Tim McGuire, the Frank Russell Chair for the Business of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he applauds the partners’ effort and the rating system, but is skeptical about what consumers’ reaction will be. “It’s biggest hole is that as a reader I have to go through and manage the index (of content) for myself. The great convenience of news the last 50 years has been there have been damned fool editors…who’ve packaged it for me.”

He added that if a consumer buys 15-20 articles a month at 99 cents, the tab comes to the price of a subscription to a print publication.

He described the business as a syndicator and pointed to another syndicator –  Newstex — which did more packaging for a different audience. As described in Ken Doctor’s 2010 book, Newsonomics, the six-year-old company edits and aggregates more than 1,500 high-quality blogs — and now user-generated video and Twitter feeds — and packages them into feeds on specific subjects for top-drawer clients, such as LexisNexis, schools, libraries and companies. The content creators get a small payment and a “modicum of promotion,” Doctor writes. “By aggregating smartly, Newstex gathered well and gathered first, making it hard for competitors to get into the market.”

For information about Watchdog City, which is based in Naples, e-mail Edwards or call her at 941-227-NEWS. Edwards was a first-place award winner in the small-newspaper category of the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest for her work uncovering public corruption in the proposed $100 million Stadium Naples golf development. Zollo won a first-place award from the Scripps Howard Foundation for a series on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.