Journalists in the 21st century are expected to work for different platforms, gather online information,
become multi‐media professionals, and learn how to deal with amateur contributions. The business
model of gathering, producing and distributing news changed rapidly. Producing content is not
enough; moderation and curation are at least as important when it comes to working for digital
platforms. There is a growing pressure on news organizations to produce more inexpensive content
for digital platforms, resulting in new models of low‐cost or even free content production.
Aggregation, either by humans or machines ‘finding’ news and re‐publishing it, is gaining importance.
At so‐called ‘content farms’ freelancers, part‐timers and amateurs produce articles that are expected
to end up high in web searches. Apart from this low‐pay model a no‐pay model emerged were
bloggers write for no compensation at all. At the Huffington Post thousands of bloggers actually work
for free. Other websites use similar models, sometimes offering writers a fixed price depending on the
number of clicks a page gets. We analyse the background, the consequences for journalists and
journalism and the implications for online news organizations. We investigate aggregation services
and content farms and no‐pay or low‐pay news websites that mainly use bloggers for input.