Word: fieldreport
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...when FieldReport's first official monthly contest ended, the skeptics were silenced. A total of $25,000 in checks went out to the authors of the winning stories in each of FieldReport's contest categories (there are 21, from "Animal Beings" to "Life + Me" to "Love + Hate" to "Style+Beauty+Body"). The most highly ranked story on the site for the month won an extra $4,000 prize. In July, $40,000 had gone out to the victors of a trial-run "beta" contest, including a grand prize of $20,000 to the author of the most popular story overall...
...less than the Nobel Prize winner for Literature - for which this year's laureate, French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, will pick up a little under $1,500,000 - but considerably more than the Pulitzer purse of $10,000. Says Thompson, "We are confident the FieldReport prize for experiential writing is the biggest single-story prize out there." What's more, he says, "It's accessible to everybody. You don't have to submit it to a judge in Stockholm...
...what about the bona fide stories on FieldReport? How good are they? "It's such a combination," Petty said. "Unlike The New Yorker, where you have a certain style and standard, here the judging process is much more emotional. In some cases, the judges respond to the reality of the story; in other cases, they respond to really great writing." The winner of the July grand prize, as well as of category prizes in both July and October, was a letter carrier from Portland, Ore., named Murr Brewster, whose folksy commentary on low-rise jeans and other fashion trends...
...Murr Brewster's story is really great writing. The Paul Simon story is raw, amazing life," Petty said. "Either of those can win on this site." The contest's only inflexible condition is that each story must be true; FieldReport checks up on the winners to verify that their narratives aren't fictional. The site's benefit for both writers and readers, according to the founders, is its sense of community. "The blogosphere hasn't given people an effective outlet for publishing this kind of story," Thompson says, "because unless you're really savvy, you're actually just jettisoning your...
...what's in it for Petty and Thompson? "For me, it's about storytelling," Petty says. "I have a very deep psychological motivation: I want this site to be an opportunity for people to think more overtly of their life in terms of story." But FieldReport has a business plan as well: it envisions making money from advertising, from albums of story collections that members create on the site and buy for about $10 each, and from a story archive Petty has designed, which asks writers and readers to pay about $20 to include their prose. "Once...
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