What started out as something as simple as starting a blog for some people, online news has become something more than just an outlet for people to share an opinion from their parents’ basement. In fact, it has suddenly become the trendy thing to do, with investors and other companies tossing big-time money to acquire creative and custom content, as well as top journalists from television.
Don’t believe us? Just take a look at what’s going on around the Internet these days, with people like Glenn Greenwald—who first broke the news about Edward Snowden while with The Guardian, and now leads the editorial team at The Intercept—or Katie Couric, the longtime TV host who has recently been swayed by Yahoo! to handle their online video team, earning a whopping $6 million per year.
What makes this all the more wild is that the news industry is supposedly in a decline, with the health of the sector being one that is both unknown currently and the future very much dependent on new technology.
Still, that hasn’t stopped investors and other major corporations from rolling the dice and offering up plenty of cash to help kickstart the evolvement of current, up-to-date, trending topics for users to view anywhere, anytime on a number of mobile devices—just look at the $250 million that First Look Media got from tech entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar for different divisions of the company to grow.
While it’s no secret that newspapers and other print outlets are relying heavily on a dying breed of readers, online media outlets are using branded content, advertisements and customized campaigns to make a model work.
So for all those either aspiring or seasoned journalists out there, while a writer’s role with The Wall Street Journal or L.A. Times might seem like a great goal, in hindsight, it might be best to latch onto a fresh startup that will help evolve the future of the online news industry—with the flexibility of creative control.
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