Problem is journalists looking for a stable income from a high quality operation won't jump on this because it's unproven but to prove this concept you need these quality journalists.
An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up readership.
We have many people interested. I haven't triaged them all, but there are high quality people in there. We don't need people to jump - there were 8000 journalists laidoff last year, and there are many many freelancers out there. The people interested are mixes of both, and some full timers who want to make money on the side, and are looking to jump online in the future.
I would love to pay out of investment, but we don't have it, so I'm not sure what we can do there.
I ran the numbers along with my regular publisher for doing something possibly similar (though only guessing based on what they are saying) here in the UK.
You could probably pick up solid but cheap freelancers to join in (one of the magazine the publisher owns encourages community generated content and quite a few tech writers got a start through it) simply because it would mean increased output for them (not being at capacity like super-pro writers generally are) and hence more money.
But it's so so hard to compete with what the print mags would pay. We talked to a few freelancers who said they wanted at least 50% of what they would get for print - but twice the uptake (i.e. twice as many articles). That's hundreds of dollars per article you have to shell out for a few months before advertising picks up to cover it.
I think it's going to be tough to do this.
I saw they were promising payments, elsewhere, of 30-70K. That is "serious writer" territory and they aren't going to get any of them.
It was the ultimate reason I haven't emailed what looks like an interesting idea - 70K is such a ludicrous promise it sounds like they barely know the talent pool :(
(though maybe US journalism works like that, I dont know)
We are aiming to get journalists a fair wage. We aren't promising payments of 30K-70K, but we needed numbers to put in the box on the Poynter site, so we put in our targets.
Do email us, you sound interesting. I'm paul [at] newslabs.com or paul.biggar [at] gmail.com.
Sorry I sounded so negative - now you've clarified things it looks a lot better. Your right the low profile thing probably worked against you, unfairly I guess.
An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up readership.