Pay citizen journalists $1000/month: modest proposal

I propose that regular citizen contributors – working, say, 40 or 50 hours a month – be paid a $1,000 monthly stipend. That comes to $20 to $25 an hour – not a lot, but not an insulting amount, either. If you're a retiree, a stay-at-home mom (or dad) or somebody looking to close a household budget gap, $1,000 a month for a few hours here, a few hours there, may seem like a pretty good deal.

The approximately one million people who live in the 13 communities in suburban Washington, D.C., Northwest Chicago and the Bay Area that Backfence tried, but failed, to serve spend about $13 billion annually shopping and dining out. That's right – $13 billion. To reach them, local online advertisers spend $28 million, based on Borrell's 2007 numbers. Of course, established Internet sites in those communities – particularly ones run by well-established metro and smaller newspapers – gobble up most of that $28 million. But what about the ad revenue crumbs that fall from the table?

Backfence shrewdly positioned itself amid all that affluence, but didn't capitalize on it. But couldn't a network of grassroots sites that actually connected with their communities pick up a small fraction of that $28 million by year two or three? How about 6 percent? That would be a little more than $1.6 million. Continuing my back-of-the-envelope math, that splits down to about $750,000 for Backfence's seven communities in the Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, and $425,000 for the three communities in Northwest Chicago and the same for the three in the Bay Area.

By my estimates, the three clusters of sites could break even and maybe squeeze out a modest profit – about $100,000 – from $1.6 million ad revenue (display and paid search).