: Attracting Writers for Crowdsourced News App I developed a news platform for people to know the most important 5-10 news stories every day. The apps/platform is targeted at people (like me) who

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I think this is a "you can if you can" answer. If you have 500, put a billboard on your site that says

"Looking for writers, editors, research, moderation.
We want to crowd-source this site! Join us!
Any level of participation welcome; enjoy the warm
glow of satisfaction in a job well done for no pay.
Plus people reading your work and endless gratitude
for your community service.

Look, Linux did it, thousands upon thousands of programmers do work for Linux for free, sometimes just a few hours a week. The reason they do is because they do think it is a a community service. A critical selling point of Linux is nobody (in the Linux foundation) is making any fortunes; although many make a decent living. So it depends to an extent on how you frame it; but Linux is a success story and would be a billion dollar product if its reach, users and fan base were in the commercial realm.

I don't think anybody would argue that "OS level programmers" is not a paid job, it is very highly paid, but you get people that spend a day tracking down a bug for nothing but their name in the code, basically.

Advertise, you already have a platform. Reach out to your readers, and whoever they know, and (since you are the developer) develop online ways for these people to interact, with queues for story submissions, queues for stories that need review, queues for writers to get story ideas, queues for research to be done, queues for editors, and ways for people to notify superiors about abuse or writing problems.

Edit: You can also pay the writer to act as initial reviewer or editor for online submissions, to cultivate more writers.

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At the risk of insulting you: pay the damn writers.

Writing is a job, an occupation. It is hard, you've already admitted it as you have no time for it. Don't crowd source it: pay for the quality you want to have instead of looking for a way to squeeze that work product out of others.

Your intentions sound noble enough. Informing people is a reasonable endeavour. But you haven't invented a new wheel, you've reinvented an old one: journalism. Or at least the platform. Don't be blinded by your good intentions to provide a needed service and think that excuses you of the moral obligation to society to pay for that which you acquire from others.

Yours truly,

Writer & software developer

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