Wednesday, March 17, 2010:
Remember AOL, the Internet site in the 1990s? Washed up last decade, it is now all set to return in a new avatar: as a digital age news operation complete with its own team of freelance writers, says Yahoo! News.
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After its exit from Time Warner last December, AOL launched a site, Seed.com, in an effort to get freelancers to churn out stories on a variety of topics ranging from pets and sports to politics and technology.
"AOL is repositioning itself as a news and information company," explained Saul Hansell, director, Seed Programming, as he showed off the Website at the annual South By South West meet of technophiles in Austin. "This is really just taking the freelance writing model that has existed forever and using the Internet to make it vastly more efficient. We have a chance with Seed and a lot of our other assets to make a big difference in journalism," he added.
Hansell was a former reporter who worked 17 years for The New York Times before he signed up for Seed three months ago. AOL editors post the allotted work profile on an online Seed bulletin board. Writers are paid between five dollars to 300 dollars per article.
Ashish Joshi, EFYTIMES News Network
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