Word: pro-am
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...ratings juggernaut, and The Food Network's Iron Chef likewise. Competition barbecue gets bigger every year. And even on the local level, every city is seeing more and more local cook-offs, from high-end ones like Cochon 555 that feature some of the best chefs in town, to pro-am affairs like the Cassoulet Contest or Meatball Slapdown, events I recently judged in New York...
...should be noted, that can be just as fairly applied to many offerings of more mainstream media). Most Examiners are not journalists, and their prose is not edited. CEO Rick Blair, who helped launch AOL's Digital Cities, an earlier attempt at a local-news network, calls them "pro-am" - more professional than bloggers, but more amateur than most reporters. You might also call them traffic hounds: because their remuneration is set by, among other things, the number of people who click on their stories, Examiners will often piggyback on hot news or oft-searched people. The Angelina Jolie story...
...meantime, these pro-am armies are giving the big media companies plenty to worry about. The mainstream media's news-harvesting machines are no match for a swarm of local locusts buzzing over the same crop. And Big Media is starting to take notice. CNN, which already uses a lot of crowdsourced material with its ireport arm, just invested in another local outfit, outside.in. Perhaps the news giant figures that if everybody's going to be a reporter, they might as well work...
...major way LPGA athletes make money is through pro-am tournaments. A player is teamed up to play a game with a corporate partner, the goal being that after a couple of putts, funny anecdotes, and friendly slaps on the back, sponsors will be buttered up enough to donate. The system requires mutual understanding on both sides. Unfortunately, a nice, shy Korean-speaker with an interpreter isn’t the ideal candidate for this kind of buddy-buddy fundraising. Nor will she rack up viewers in interviews on the major television networks, another large source of sponsorship. From...
...Relying on sources like pro-am tournaments as a source of funds so heavily that they determine tour policy may seem like selling out, but the devil has been at the door for women’s sports for a long time. Female professional athletes traditionally have fewer fans and far less media coverage than their male counterparts; according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, women-only sports articles account for only 3.5 percent of all sports stories, and 94 percent of local television news sports coverage goes to men. The last thing the LPGA wants...