Every media manager dreamed of a website where citizen journalists would publish high-quality articles while making money. I met with a Ukrainian entrepreneur who made it (almost) happen.

Citizen journalism seemed to be a fad, judging from the failure of Skoeps.nl, Backfence or Oh My News Japan and the financial difficulties of Oh My News in Korea, not even talking about the irrelevance of France’s Agoravox.

Highway (ХайВей) is a Kiev-based citizen journalism venture that turns in both profits and newsworthy stories. I met with Highway’s founder and CEO Serhiy Danylenko in Kiev last week.

Not news, conversation!

Unlike other citJ ventures, Highway doesn’t aim at overthrowing traditional media or at becoming a new press agency. Instead, they started as a place for publishing and sharing university newspapers, back in 2004.

Danylenko says he’s guided by “the principles of Web2.0″: social networking, content sharing and wisdom of crowds. Only he was using them before they became clichéd buzzwords.

This philosophy now takes the shape of a 14,000-strong community of users (1,500 of which log in every month) who produce 100 news items per day. An editor-in-chief, whom Danylenko prefers to call Chief Social Network Moderator, manages this avalanche of content.

Highway is engineered in such ways that the wisdom of crowds can hardly be gamed, or trolled:

• Editors are all-powerful. They can promote articles they deem newsworthy and delete a comment they judge inappropriate. A flagging system was set up, but it was easily gamed: people would flag comments they don’t agree with.
• Trolls are contacted directly. If a user gets censored too many times, the editor manually sends him or her an email to remind him of the Terms of Use. The user then gets blocked for a week.
• Article reviews. Each article can be reviewed on 4 criteria (professionalism of journalism, beauty of language, form of the article, including the use of pictures, hyperlinks etc. and a general opinion). The beauty of the system is that these reviews can then be rated.

These mechanisms allow for effective filtering. On any given day, the editor of Highway only reads 20% of the material published. The other 80% aren’t spam; they’re just managed by the community.

Not all material reaches professional quality, and it’s not what readers are after (love is the biggest keyword in the tag cloud). Media professionals consider it a low-end, yellow-press outlet, but the content produced still has some journalistic value.

A megaphone for the voiceless

Like most post-socialist countries, Ukraine is very centralized and rural areas remain extremely poor. That translates into a media landscape where Kiev, the capital city, gobbles up all the national media. The provinces are left with embryonic newspapers and TV stations.

Users from outside Kiev (50% of total) like Highway for it is the biggest media outlet they can access. The nationwide audience of the website outnumbers the readership of their local paper both in terms of quality and quantity. Serhiy knows of users contributing to Highway from internet cafes in remote cities. For them, “Highway is like a miracle”, he says.

A citizen journalist once reported on a mother of several children who had a hard time making ends meet. Staff from the Family and Youth Ministry heard about it and sent help to the neglected mother (at least that’s what they said).

Another reporter wrote about the uncollected piles of garbage in a small village of Western Ukraine. The story snowballed on the web to the point where the national and local media ran it. In the end, the trash was removed by the company responsible for it in the first place.

In these occasions, Highway had a real impact on society. That’s proof of the influence media outlets seek so ardently (if you had media theory classes – and remember them – that’s the Jurgensmeyer model )

On top of that, Highway boasts a 40/60 facts over opinion ratio. 40% of factual articles is way more than Agoravox, for instance.

The quality of Highway’s content comes in part from the number of professional journalists who write on the site. 25% of users are professional journalists:

• Journalism students, looking for experience and visibility for their starting career,
• Bored journalists, who want to publish on a topic different from their beat, and
• Leftovers, when a journalist has some material that didn’t make it to the print version (interviews bits, for instance).

Highway resembles a social network for journalists on some aspects. Users share contacts on the site, especially freelancers wishing to write for foreign outlets. Serhiy and his team try to hide this fact away from general users, lest it scares non-journalists off.

Unlike many citJ ventures, Highway never spent a significant amount of cash on training citizen journalists. Instead, they give away press cards to users (500 in total, 3.5% of users). The Ukrainian law allows them to do so, so that some of their users can freely go to press conferences or crime scenes.

Money matters (just a little)

The 1^st incentive for publishing on Highway is communication. The 2^nd one must be money. Every month, users share a $1000 pot. The idea was to shower users with a “rain of money” to reward them for their efforts, Danylenko says.

Writers get paid between $8 and 1$ for their articles, if they enter the daily or weekly top 5. There’s also a $5 reward for the 3 editor’s picks, so that populism doesn’t drive money-seeking users. All in all, how much you earn depends on how often you appear on the homepage – a decision based on the number of clicks as well as on the editor’s appreciation. Users who wrote article reviews also receive money: $10 daily shared between the best reviews.

The system allows for 15 to 20 users to receive money every month (you need to have $10 on your account to receive your payment) and 2,000 users have some money on their account. If you earn $300 a month and receive $50 from Highway, a scenario not uncommon, it means that citizen journalism provides you with 17% extra income.

The difference with Skoeps and other ventures for which money was to be the main motivation is that Highway clearly emphasizes that they’re not a business. A bit hypocritical, maybe, but it allows for both attention- and money-seekers to contribute to the site.

Total staff: .5 person

Although several people are involved in running Highway, Danylenko says the citJ project requires 10% of the time of his company’s 5 employees. Do the math: that’s half a staffer managing 14,000 users.

Such a model comes with a drawback, as you need to please advertisers. That means increasing the sacrosanct pageviews and unique visitors. Involvement and time spent aren’t (yet) a priority for Ukrainian advertisers.

To increase traffic, Highway resolved to partnerships with other websites. That explains the bikini-clad asses you see on every page.

Besides, it means that a large part of the 30,000 daily visitors and 150,000 daily pageviews are trash. It’s also impossible to know how the audience is developing: Google says it’s declining, BigMir (the Ukrainian Comscore) says it’s growing and Danylenko says the number of logins increases by 2% a month.

Despite the quantity of low-quality visitors (and, hence, the relatively low audience of the site), Highway successfully embodies the mix between social network and news website.