A Citizen Journalism Experiment That Pays

The Huffington Post has had some notable successes with its citizen journalism spin-off, Off The Bus -- but it could soon have some competition from a new website with a big built-in advantage.

Allvoices.com also wants to turn regular people into reporters, but, unlike Huffpo, it's willing to pay them for their big scoops or catchy blog posts. Today, the San Francisco-based social network-slash-news site, which went live two weeks ago after a year in beta, unveiled a play to award users up to $10,000 for writing stories that attract a lot of eyeballs.

The "Excellence in Citizen Media Initiative" is a limited-time affair, running from now through next February, but Allvoices founder Amra Tareen says it's a concept she plans to resurrect once the site's a little better established. "We're experimenting with this to sort of seed the community, but eventually we do want to share some of the revenue with the user. A few bucks can make a big difference, depending where you're located."

Ideally, in Tareen's vision, those users will be located all over the world. A former communications engineer, she first began thinking about doing something like Allvoices after Sept. 11, and crystalized the concept while volunteering in Pakistan following the 2005 earthquake. "People had stories to tell, but there was no place for them to tell them," she says. "I really wanted to create a discussion around current news and events, a social networking community where anyone could report from anywhere in the world. I believe to solve our issues we need to have a conversation and a dialogue as opposed to bombing people."

But while that might sound like a political statement, Tareen promises that Allvoices, which is backed by $4.5 million in funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners, won't have an agenda, or at least not one imposed by from the top down. Any political leanings it displays will emerge organically, she says. "We don't have a point of view. We'll let the community figure it out."

Incidentally, the pay rate at Allvoices, for those who qualify, is pretty good. Users who compile 100,000 page views over a six-month period will receive $1,000, and those who hit 1 million page views will get $10,000. That's twice the going rate these days at Gawker Media. And, of course, it's infinitely better than the big fat nothing you can earn blogging for Huffpo.