Columbia Journalism students created an experiment to find out what their longform stories were worth at Project Wordsworth.

Core Principles

•  “Our stories are worth something.” These students saw themselves as working writers, not charity cases, and felt they should be paid for their work. (They just weren’t just not sure how much.)
• “Without sharing, our stories won’t find an audience.” Their target audiences (those most likely to read, share and pay for their work) are communities of people interested in the topics they were writing about
• “The design of our site should equally encourage reading, sharing and paying.” Paying should be encouraged but not required.

The class split into three groups: one handling e-commerce, another tasked with designing the site, and the third serving as a social media team.