The infamous German tabloid/gutter press Bild also pays you money for videos or photos and credit you as "citizen journalist". Similarly news agencies ask you on Twitter if they can use your footage.
There are also “De Correspondent” [1] in the Netherlands, which inspired “Krautreporter” [2] in Germany and “Republik” [3] in Switzerland. Both De Correspondent and Republik set new records for crowd-funding in journalism, with the latter raising on the order of 3.5M USD. These projects used crowd-funding as initial funding though, and not for individual stories. Their ongoing financing is based on paid subscriptions.
Most of the big German news sites require you to either accept ads, or pay for a subscription.
It is sadly perfectly legal afaik. Nobody is entitled to your content without agreeing to some terms. Luckily, archive.is works very well. Wish there were more alternatives.
Actually they do a pretty bad job. Most of the stuff they have is only available to subscribers [0] (Watch out for SZPlus). This topic is too big to put it behind a paywall, but in Germany the whole thing is already out of the focus of MSM. [1] (CTRL-F : Paradise)
I'm sorry, I didn't want to imply that it's like Russia Today or similar. § 26 of the Act kinda forbids that and the work they do is usually superb and important. Especially in countries that lack democratic media.
There is however a difference and you can see it on articles as the one above. I'm sure no journalist was pushed to release this article in this way but this is what happens when you're funded by the current Government and have to report something they won't like. You just leave out certain information here and there and with that you change the overall tone of the information.
This is the article by the main news outlet of the normal German public service on the same topic:
Yes, there’s a German platform that did this fairly successfully: Krautreporter [1] (the article mentions that they were in turn inspired by a Dutch magazine). I know nothing about their finances but they seem to be doing well, and have established themselves as a somewhat niche but serious competitor.
That's true. I actually don't know how the incentives are structured for executives in the German broadcast but they seem to reward creating quality, unbiased news.
If you look at the most popular newspaper in Germany which is essentially a tabloid it's clear it's not because there is less demand for that kind of trash in Germany.
Seems to be quite common practice for some news outlets here in Germany. I remember that I read a court decision stating that this would for some reason be acceptable. Not sure if it really is though.
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