media - Emerging new media organizations

(tomorrow also at Poynters' Tidbits)
Now the boundaries by time, place and capital much of what made the old media into media are being eroded as internet access grows, new kinds of media organizations are emerging. But what is making a media organization especial now the old, natural restraints allow everybody to go global, at any time and at almost no costs?
This week I attended an exciting example of how those new media could look like in Amsterdam, where representatives of 17 countries, making over 30 websites discussed how their originally academic project of the wage indicator could develop into a media operation too. The project collects online information on wages and labor conditions, started in 2001 in the Netherlands, expanded last year to eight other European countries and is covering now
some of the larger economies including the US, Brazil andIndia.
China and Japan are on the agenda for coming year when the project expects to expand to 25 countries. The site allows visitors to use a scientifically approved salary checker and tries to draw in enough surveys to match the requirements for academic publications.
The country teams consist of researchers of prestigious universities, a media organization and a social organization - often a trade union. From the start the ambitions were higher than only making boring academic reports for dusty shelves: in a fast globalizing world, its wants to give leveraged information on wages. The focus is ideal for a successful internet project: is making money not the hottest online subject after sex?
"We are now in a position where - after the Netherlands - other countries are delivering valid data," says Paulien Osse, director of the Wage Indicator Foundation and a former journalist herself. "The first projects to compare salaries between countries are getting in place and are very promising."
For the journalists - or content managers as they are called in the new media parlance - it was the first effort to pull efforts together on a global scale. "Really a very useful meeting," said Lorena Ponce de Leon, the web-editor of La Nacion, one of Argentina's largest daily papers. "People did have a very diverse background, and had very different qualities in working on the internet, but that is part of the excitement. By working together we can improve a lot."

Disclosure: I'm the project manager of the China Wage Indicator.