Photo : Frederic Poirot

MATADOR is looking for an intern who is crazy-passionate about travel and is ready to contribute their creative vision and energy.

You’ll be working directly with Matador Video editor Joshywashington, and helping with such tasks as:

*formatting and publishing video posts

*practicing the art social media promotion with the Matador editorial team

*helping build content at MatadorTV

*engaging the travel video community

*helping produce content about travel video at The Traveler’s Notebook

Are you ready to join the most read independent online travel publishing network?

Email us : josh [at] matadornetwork.com

THIS IS basically an open question for Matador community members, as well as prospective members, including bloggers, writers, filmmakers, and photographers.

Our current terms of service provide copyright protection to anyone who posts content to Matador. This basically means that once you post something at Matador it’s illegal for someone else to re-post, reprint, or in any other way re-publish your work outside of Matador (although you as the author are free to republish it anywhere you want).

This policy, however, goes against a philosophy we believe in, mainly that online publishing and the communities that support online publishing should be based on transparency and set up in such a way as to, in CC’s words, “increase sharing and improve collaboration.”

The upside to having your content available via CC is that other blogs and websites would be able to republish your work, providing you with more links and an increased footprint on the web.

Our fear however, is that writers, photographers, and others who do not want their content to be shared, would not continue to participate actively in our community.

With all of this in mind, please take a second to help us know what you think:

Thanks for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We invite you to further explain (if necessary) your ideas in the comments below.

A writer in Mexico City. Photos: Julie Schwietert

My friend Sylvie Laitre of Mexico Boutique Hotels just alerted me to a writing contest and asked that I invite Matador writers to participate.

The Nick Gallo Award, named for travel writer Nick Gallo, who died on assignment in Greece in 2008, will be awarded to a writer who had an article about Mexico published in 2009.

Here are the contest specs:

• The contest is open to all U.S.- and Canada-based freelance writers specializing in Mexico.
• The article must have been published in 2009.
• The article must be at least 800 words and was published in either print media (magazine or newspaper) or an online publication. (Blogs are not eligible).
• The topic must be related to Mexico’s tourism and/or culture.

The contest is sponsored by Mexico Boutique Hotels, www.MexicoPremiere.com, and AeroMexico. The entry deadline is March 15, 2010, and the winner will be announced in late April. The entries will be judged by a panel of professionals from the Mexico tourism industry, including executives from airlines and hotels, and the winner will receive:

• An original woodblock print on plexiglass/lucite created by artist Laurie Brown, Nick Gallo’s wife;
• Two round-trip tickets from their nearest US gateway to Ciudad Obregon, Mexico;
• A three night stay at Hacienda de los Santos, one of Mexico Boutique Hotels’ properties and the former home of an 18th century silver baron;
• Daily full menu breakfast at the Agave Café;
• Two massages;
• Two dinners; and
• A one-hour aerial tour of the Sierra Madre with pilot and Hacienda de los Santos owner, Jim Swickard.

Entries should be sent to editor@mexicopremiere.com.

Matador contributors have written some incredible articles and essays about Mexico, so I hope to see the winner of the award come from our community of writers.

Community Connection:

For tips on becoming a better writer, be sure to reference our How to Write Focus Page and consider joining MatadorU, our 12 week travel writing program.

COMMUNITY FUNDED reporting. I like this idea a lot. Their domain name is sweet too, Spot.Us

Spot.us is, as stated in their elevator pitch-

a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Read More

The basic concept is that you can donate $20 (or other amounts) to help fund currently accepted pitches, and you can also register, which enables you to submit your own pitches for consideration and funding.

Just to get an idea of what kinds of pitches are currently being funded, check out some of these titles:

*Who Benefits from the Legalization of Medical Marijuana

*American Apparel’s Firings: A Canary in the Immigration Policy Coal Mine

*New Depression in LA

Admittedly, I’ve only just briefly checked out this community, but I love what I see so far. There appears to be a very clean and straightforward system of submitting pitches, having work peer reviewed as well as work on stories in collaboration, something I believe will become more and more common to journalists working in 2010.

What really stokes me though about the concept of Spot.Us is that it’s locally-based (currently in the Bay Area and Los Angeles) yet scalable worldwide.

With current freelance writing rates bottoming out last year, Spot.Us gives writers a chance to make a decent rate for their work, and most importantly, pursue stories they might otherwise be unable to afford researching or going after. I would love to see this blow up around the country.

For more info, check out this slideshow:

Community Connection

What do you think about community funded reporting? Please let us know in the comments. We’d especially like to hear from any community members of spot.us.

I HAVE NO interest in media deathwatches. I published a few pieces on newspaper circulations taking massive hits a couple months ago, and am over it. We all know (I think) where this is going.

For me it’s always about people, places, and communities, not institutions. So that said, yesterday’s news that National Geographic Adventure was folding made me sad for the writers and editors who lost their jobs, and how this will likely play out at ground level (the fragmentation of what I imagine to be a very soulful and tight community), but I’m not 100% sure that, as Steve Casimiro said, “outdoor culture is far emptier for this news.”

Outdoor culture is made emptier when a beloved person (Shane McConkey comes to mind) or place (say, a river being dammed) is lost. But the institutions themselves, whether media companies, magazine, or gear companies, are still only peripheral. They’re always in the wavelike process of forming, swelling, breaking, and reforming. At least that’s how I see it.

After getting laid off from USA Today, Travel Editor Chris Faust’s goodbye to USA Today blog expressed similar remorse. This firing wasn’t just his team getting axed but an affront to the institution of journalism.

She writes, “What bothers me the most is what my firing represented. See, I’ve been learning all the tricks that a modern multi-platform journalist is supposed to know. In the past 22 months, I’ve blogged, tweeted, shot photos and videos, and handled speaking engagements…I hustled and I cajoled and I ended up out on my ass anyway…I’m a true believer in the power of journalism. I walked into my first newspaper office when I was 16, fell in love with deadlines and chaos, and never looked back.. . I felt it was a calling, more so than a job.”

I like how Faust looks downstream at freelancers “creating niche businesses, busting up the paradigm.” She writes, “These freelancers-slash-entrepreneurs are smart. They are nimble. And now they are my role models, as I join their ranks.”

And if anything, I respect Faust for looking ahead, and I respect the NatGeo Adventure editors / officers for simply calling it and moving on as opposed to flailing (like the Dallas Morning News section editors now reporting directly to sales managers) or in some way undercutting their original vision.

All of this leads me back to Matador. From our start in 2006, the vision has always been to enable writers to take the path of least resistance between place, story, and reader. It’s something that never could’ve existed pre-internet, but at the same time is an ethic born out of relating to place and community in the most on the ground, person-to-person way possible.

As a writer and old-school journalist myself, my initial instinct was to press CEO Ross Borden towards coming up with some kind of print manifestation of Matador. An anthology perhaps, a monthly print edition. I felt it would be a validation of sorts.

Ross was always looking farther downstream however, and could already see a new direction–readership, community, and media based on blog networks–as the future. This blog in particular, The Traveler’s Notebook, was the first we decided to launch. It would help give people tools and resources for becoming new school travel writers and journalists.

From here we’ve put everything we’ve learned into a new media learning center, MatadorU. As I said earlier, I’m not interested in seeing old school journalists getting beat down. I want to see people with stories worth telling, regardless of institutions, get the audience that they (both the writers and the stories) deserve.

Community Connection

How are you, as a writer and / or journalist, dealing with the revolution taking place in publishing and journalism? Please let us know in the comments.

THE BOTTOM LINE is this: in today’s media revolution, each moment seems to bring yet another opportunity for citizen journalists, backpack filmmakers, travel writers, and virtually anyone with a creative vision and a willingness to find and document interesting stories.

One of the central tenets we teach travel writers at MatadorU is that to publish, it’s necessary to develop a “publication mindset.” In other words, to look at publishing not from the perspective of a writer but from that of the person receiving your work.

With this in mind, look at how YouTube’s new platform YouTube Direct is going to facilitate the search for and incorporation of user-generated content like yours for media websites around the world:

Knowing this, ask yourself how you can develop your portfolio, presence, and reach as a citizen journalist or filmmaker. Here are several resources to help get you started, or to build on knowledge you already have:

*4 Tips for Shooting Better Travel Videos
*How to Use Voice Over to Tell a Story
*Tips for Travel Video: The Elements of a Story
*Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards [A straight up guide to the elements journalistic storytelling for those with little or no training.]

Community Connection

How do you plan on utilizing the continually unfolding opportunities for citizen journalism? And for editors of media sites: what is your experience so far with YouTube Direct?

Please share your comments with us below.

THE CONCEPT is to capture the essence of your day creativity and with style. And you better bring your A game cause 100 stacks of cheddar is gonna bring out some amazing filmmakers.

Contest Breakdown

The Judges are Nikon jockey Ashton Kutcher, social media celebrity iJustine, Photographer Chase Jarvis and Actor Rainn Wilson. And as you can tell with with sample videos, the bar is set pretty high.

Here’s your chance to win enough money to travel the world 3 times over!
Get on it at the official contest page & Good Luck!