Fwix Aims To Spread The Wealth (Although “Wealth” Is Probably The Wrong Word)

Hyperlocal news startup, Fwix, has been making some noise recently, with articles detailing the firm’s offerings in The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, and Mashable.
Now The Wall Street Journal is taking a look the company’s efforts to share revenue with hyperlocal publishers and individual journalists.

Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.
“One of the things I want to change in the industry is how we pay people that are producing the content,” said Darian Shirazi, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Fwix. He acknowledged no local news bloggers are going to get rich from AdWire revenue but said he hopes to set a model for the industry to help sustain new local forms of journalism.
“‘We’re just going to send you traffic,’ isn’t sustainable for the industry overall,” Mr. Shirazi said.

Take a look at the static image of the Fwix widget I placed in this post. See where it says, “Sponsor: People in Portland are getting hdtv channels at low prices.” That’s the text ad being served up by Fwix. When a visitor to my Web site clicks this text ad, Fwix will share revenue with me plus the writers of the editorial content surrounding the text ad, provided they’ve registered as journalists with Fwix.