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The latest news about Seed.com, contributing to AOL’s sites, and journalism careers in the Internet age.

Saul Hansell

Saul Hansell

Saul Hansell is the programming director of seed.com, working to make sure that all the articles, photographs and other work created through seed satisfies and delights the people who find them on the Internet.

As programming director, his role includes contributing to the content strategy for seed, working with editors to use seed to expand their sites and developing new sites that take advantage of seed. 

From 1992 to 2009, he was a reporter at the New York Times, mainly covering technology. He was the founding editor of Bits, a blog on nytimes.com covering technology that began in June 2007.

From 1987 to 1992, he was an associate editor and a senior writer of Institutional Investor, a monthly magazine about finance.   

Raised in Detroit, he received a B. A. in Urban Studies/Economics from Columbia College in 1984. At Columbia, he was the news director of WKCR—FM, the university radio station. 

He lives in Montclair, N.J., with his wife, Lynne Eisenbrand, and two daughters.

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A toast to you

Posted Mar 17th 2010 at 10:42AM
by Saul Hansell (subscribe to Saul Hansell's posts)
Comments 1

Howdy from Austin.

It's been great being down in the Seed Lounge on the floor of the Austin Convention center talking to so many people about Seed and AOL. It's been particularly gratifying talking to people who have written interviews of the bands set to play in the music festival here about how they enjoyed the assignment and to band members who feel that their stories have been well told.

We want to thank everyone involved in this project, and we'd like to take you to lunch, today Wednesday March 17.

Even if you didn't write a band interview, please join me, Melissa Olund, the managing editor of AOL Music, and the rest of the Seed and Spinner.com team. It's an informal gathering where we can talk about music, writing, Seed, and what's up at South By this year.

We're having two lunches, 11:30 to 1 and 2 to 3:30. They are at Brazos loft. 201 E. 5th street. You can't miss it because the AOL Monster is out front.

We'd love to get a count on who's coming, so RSVP in the comments here or by sending an e-mail to SeedLunch1@corp.aol.com for the 11:30 lunch or SeedLunch2@corp.aol.com for the 2 PM lunch.

If you're in town, I look forward to seeing you there. If not, I'm raising my (cowboy boot shaped) glass to you.

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SXSW beyond Twitter: 140 words and a photo

Posted Mar 13th 2010 at 7:33AM
by Saul Hansell (subscribe to Saul Hansell's posts)
Comments 3

Two years ago, an easy-to-underestimate technology tornado was let loose from a stage at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Twitter. Suddenly there was a way for anyone with a cellphone to tell the world what they were seeing, doing or thinking. Since then, Twitter has become one of the fastest and most comprehensive sources of news in the world, at least 140 character sparks of news.

This year at SXSW, AOL is going to try a slightly different format that we hope will be as quick and easy for people to create yet more satisfying to read.

We call this the 140/140 Close-Up, a three part bundle of information:
  • ·A 140 tight word description of one moment, event or idea. (For SXSW, that means the most transcendent song of the set, the most improbable costume on the street, the most outrageous ruckus at the party, or the most inspirational comment at the panel discussion.)
  • One photograph that captures the drama or humor of the moment. A cellphone photo is fine.
  • And a witty 140 character headline that will be sent out on Twitter with a link to the post and photo. (Sticklers will note that there are really about 120 characters for your headline to leave room for the link and hashtag.)

Anyone in Austin over the next week can contribute these 140/140 Close-Ups through Seed.com, our platform for hiring the world to help us make the most amazing Web sites. We'll pay you $10 for every item we publish. When did Twitter ever buy you anything? (If you're interested, see the instructions below.)

Post on your phone

Not by accident, this assignment is tailor-made for our nifty new Seed Mobile application. That's right, anyone with an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android phone can download an application that will let you claim any Seed assignment, write articles, and attach a cellphone picture right on your handset.

Of course, you can write your Close-Ups on a computer too. Stop by the Seed Lounge in the Fourth Street lobby of the Austin convention center to use our computers and Wi-Fi. (Even if you're not going to spend your precious moments at SXSW writing, come by anyway to meet the Seed team and AOL's editors. We'll also tell you about a bunch of cool events we're holding throughout the festival.)

Read on premier sites

The other great advantage of writing through Seed is that you are not tweeting into the wilderness. The 140/140 posts will appear along with the great SXSW coverage on AOL's very popular network of sites. Our experienced editors are weeding out the duplicate and off-topic submissions, so readers will get the most lively and comprehensive coverage anywhere.

All the posts about the Interactive side of the festival will be on DownloadSquad, which covers all sorts of Internet and software tools and ideas. The SXSW film festival will be covered on Cinematical, our site for the passionate movie lover. And, of course, the music items will be on Spinner, AOL's indie, rock and beyond site. Spinner has also been the home of our other exciting SXSW project: using Seed writers to interview as many of the nearly 2,000 bands playing in the music festival as possible. They are amazing. Take a look here:http://www.spinner.com/tag/sxswseed.

Be a rock-and-roll detective.

But there are a few bands that our very intrepid Seed reporters have not yet tracked down. And that brings us to a few more assignments we've got for SXSW attendees this week: We're looking for a few people to track down the remaining and (politely) try to interview the ones that got away. If a childhood watching Miami Vice made you always want to be a rock-and-roll detective, we've got a job for you.

On the other hand, if you've got a little Diane Arbus inside trying to get out, take a look at the set of slightly warped projects from Urlesque, AOL's guide to the culture, humor and deep strangeness of the Worldwide Web. It wants pictures of the oddest laptop stickers, the most anti-social geeks and more.

Here is everything you need to know to write and take pictures about SXSW for AOL and where to read all of our coverage, from both Seed contributors and the best team of professional music, movie and Web journalists around. If you're in Austin, I hope to meet you. If not, we've got a lot of ways you can follow the action besides a pile of Tweets.

Covering SXSW for Seed
Sign up: If you're not already registered for Seed, go to Seed.com. Registration takes less than a minute, but you'll need to check your e-mail to verify your log in.
Pick your project: Once you log into Seed.com, select "Special Events" from the dropdown menu in the "Recommended Assignments" section. You'll see the complete list of projects related to SXSW. Click on them to read more and press "Claim This" if you want to write it.
Go mobile: If you've got a smartphone, download the mobile app at Seed.com/mobile.
One trick: You can start a post on your phone and then finish it on a Web connected computer. But you can't use your phone to work on something you started on the Web.

Following SXSW
AOL has the most comprehensive coverage of SXSW anywhere, brought to you by dozens of journalists and hundreds of seed contributors. Read it here:

Interactive:
Download Squad SXSX Interactive coverage: www.downloadsquad.com/sxsw
Download Squad Twitter feed: twitter.com/downloadsquad

Movies:
Cinematical SXSW film coverage: www.cinematical.com/category/sxsw/
Cinematical Twitter Feed: twitter.com/cinematical

Music:
Full AOL Music SXSW coverage: music.aol.com/sxsw/
Spinner's SXSW coverage including 140/140 posts: spinner.com/sxsw
Spinner Twitter feed: twitter.com/spinnersxsw
Band directory with interviews: music.aol.com/artist/genre/sxsw/a

Urlesque:
Urlesque's "The people of SXSW: on Tumblr: http://peopleofsxsw.tumblr.com
Urlesque's Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/urlesque

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We want you to help cover SXSW

Posted Feb 17th 2010 at 1:09AM
by Saul Hansell (subscribe to Saul Hansell's posts)
Comments 0

Every year 2,000 bands converge on Austin, Tex., for the annual South By Southwest music festival. This year, AOL's Spinner.com plans to interview all of them in advance. That's something that no other music outlet has accomplished.

But with your help, we can do it. Simply join AOL's music writing team through Seed.com, our new site that invites people to write and take pictures about what they are most interested in and earn money at the same time.

You don't need to have written a cover story forRolling Stone to participate, but you do have to be a resident of the United States. If you are passionate about music, attend shows and talk to bands (or just want to), this is an excellent opportunity to get your byline in front of millions of fellow music fans around the world.

If you're selected, we'll send you the name of a band. You'll research them, interview them and write up the interview in a simple Q&A format, as well as compose a brief biography. If we run your piece, you'll pocket $50. That's a bellyful of BBQ down in Austin, Texas. Plus, if your interview is published and you enjoyed the assignment, you may have the opportunity to contribute more.

We've already started publishing these interviews. You can read them here. But there is still time to jo



If you're interested in interviewing a band now, contact us at SXSWSeed@aol.com with the subject line "Writing for SXSW." In the body of the email, you must include the following information:

- Name (Legal name -- no pen names accepted)
- Physical Address
- Preferred phone number
- E-mail
- AIM screenname (If you have one. If you don't, get AIM here.)
- Will you be attending SXSW 2010?
- Highest education completed (students welcome -- just let us know)
- Describe your writing experience, if any (100 words max)
- Describe your musical tastes (100 words max)
- List all employment or connection to the music industry or other potential conflicts (if any)
- Feel free to append one writing sample or a link to a published work of yours (optional).

Please note that all assignments would need to be completed within a specified deadline, typically one week, and you need to follow our standards of responsible reporting and accept our publishing program agreement, which can be found here:http://www.seed.com/publishing-agreement/

When contacting the band for an interview, you can describe yourself as representing for Spinner and AOL. It is not appropriate to describe yourself as working for AOL or Spinner in any other context, such as requesting press passes, tickets, or recordings.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,The Spinner Staff

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Calling all 2,000 bands playing at SXSW

Posted Jan 28th 2010 at 8:48PM
by Saul Hansell (subscribe to Saul Hansell's posts)
Comments 8

Every March, tens of thousands of music fans converge on Austin, Tex., for the annual South by Southwest festival, where nearly 2,000 bands play over five intense days. But which bands to see? The festival site links to the bands' own sites. Music sites offer a round up of some hot bands playing.

This year, AOL's indie music site, Spinner.com, is going to do something that as far as I can tell has never been done before. Over the six weeks, we are going to interview as many of the 2,000 bands as we can reach on the telephone. Spinner will publish the Q&A interviews with all these bands. And we'll also write band biographies for all of them that will appear in the AOL Music artist directory.

Actually some of you will conduct a lot of these interviews and create a lot of these profiles, by way of Seed, working alongside the veteran music journalists at Spinner. Starting today, you can apply to join our SxSW profile team. We'll send you the name of a musician to interview and a guide on how to do it. If your interview is published and you enjoyed the assignment, you can ask for more bands to interview. We'll pay $50 per profile, and you also get the fun of talking to artists on the cutting edge of indie music.

The details of how to join the profile team are in this post on Spinner and also on Seed in the Arts & Entertainment category.

And if you are going to SXSW, check back soon for how to join our SXSW street team, where you'll help be our eyes and especially ears, in the clubs, at the parties and yes on the streets of Austin.

With this project, we're starting to show off how Seed is going to be very different from other sites that offer writing work over the Internet. Seed is an integral part of the new AOL, one of the largest journalistic organizations in the world. And we're asking Seed contributors not simply to regurgitate what they can find searching the Web, but to get on the phone, get out into the world, ask questions, witness events and write what they've discovered.

You can also see how we are going to evolve the way Seed deals with creators. So far, we have mainly had open assignments, in which any number of people could submit articles. Some have said this seems more like a contest than a job. For SXSW, we are only asking one writer to profile each band. To make this work, we are using e-mail for part of the process. Soon the Seed site will automatically handle this sort of assignment. And it will invite creators to tell us about their professional experience, so we can match the right assignments to the right people.

Like everything we're doing now at Seed, this is very much an experiment. We don't know how these interviews will turn out. But I'm betting, they will be as lively and varied as the SXSW festival itself.

UPDATE 2/10 As of today, we have more than 300 people who have been assigned profiles and more than 100 have been completed. Nearly all of them are fun, lively and interesting. We've started publishing them on Spinner. You can read them here: http://www.spinner.com/tag/sxswseed.

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The Seed Creed

Posted Jan 20th 2010 at 3:42PM
by Saul Hansell (subscribe to Saul Hansell's posts)
Comments 13

I'll confess, I got a lot of blank stares and "I'm sure you must know what you are doing" responses when I told my friends and family last month that I was leaving the New York Times after 17 years to join AOL.

AOL to most of them brings back a distant memory of a modem squeaking and the ever chipper voice booming "You've got MAIL!" back in the days when e-mail was exciting, rather than a mix of work obligations and offers for pills with rather unusual effects. Some associate the company with its rather ill-fated merger with Time Warner.

AOL is a very different company now. It is independent again. And its mission is to redefine journalism for the Internet age. That's why I joined. And that's why I'm inviting you to join us too, by way of this site, Seed.com, which I help run.

AOL today has 3,500 full and part-time journalists, asking questions, providing answers, telling stories, and taking pictures for 80 different Web sites including Engadget for technology, Spinner for indie music, Gadling for travel, and Politics Daily for, yes, politics. These sites served 77 million people last month.

But that's not enough. Our mission is what we call the Seed Creed: To satisfy the world's curiosity.

That's right. Whatever people want to know, whether it be about suffering in Sarajevo or shampooing a schnauzer, we want to be able to tell them -- fast, accurately, and in the most compelling way we can.

And that's where you come in.

Sign up for Seed.com. It only takes a minute to register. Then you can see a list of all the topics we need you to write about or subjects we need photographs of. Soon we'll have video and other sorts of projects too.

Today, WalletPop, our personal finance site, asks people with first-hand experience to write "What it's like working at...Target." Sphere, our general news site, is looking for people to interview experts to write about "The Next Frontier in Space Exploration."

"You want me to be a reporter," you are saying to yourself with the hard-bitten cynicism of a veteran of the police beat. "What's in it for me?"

How does cold hard cash strike you? Well, at least the hot electronic equivalent zipped right to your bank or PayPal account. We'll pay anywhere from $10 to $300 for an article on Seed, depending on the complexity, your experience and the expected interest level. In the future, we may offer a way for you to share in the advertising revenue generated by your work.

The questions keep coming. "Aren't there a lot of other companies offering write-at-home work? How is Seed any different?"

Seed is different because AOL is different. With such a large staff of professional journalists working with Seed and some very sophisticated news-gathering technology, our sites offer readers a level of quality and breadth that others simply can't match.

And that means the experience of working for Seed is very different as well. Your work will appear right next to articles written by Pulitzer Prize winners and other journalists at the top of their game on sites seen daily by millions of people. And we're not just asking you to write from home in your pajamas. We're inviting you, if you're interested, to pick up your reporters' notebook and join us in our front row seats watching the most interesting events in our world.

Seed assignments will soon include covering sports events, press conferences and concerts. We're asking you to meet or talk on the phone with newsmakers, celebrities and experts in all subjects. We're looking for those with an eye for details to help us comb through documents and research a wide variety of topics to uncover interesting information. And we want those of you with a knack for taking pictures and shooting video to help document what our world looks like.

We're going to be picky. We only want to work with people with ability, dedication, and a commitment to the highest standards of accuracy and ethics. But we also know that there are people with talent for journalism in many places, not all of whom are interested in a full-time job. That's why our initial assignments are open to anyone. We'll buy the ones we like. Soon, we will add the ability to make specific assignments to people we've come to respect and others who have experience under their belts.

Over time, we're going to look for people to help us with other tasks too -- copy editing, fact checking, and compiling databases, for example.

I think we can say that we offer the widest range of opportunities for people interested in journalism and the very best place to build a career. We've got roles for people of every experience level, and a path to grow -- from Seed, to steady assignments on our sites, to full-time writing and editing positions.

That's what attracted me. And I hope you'll join us as well.

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