Six Apart is telling laid off journalists “Your Tumblr, while clever, will not pay your bills.” and have launched the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program in support of online journalism and to help jobless journalists start their own site.
As part of the deal, journalists will get a free TypePad Pro blog account. Now they can unleash the same blogging tool used by big media blogs, and also get professional support. Normally a Typepad Pro Subscription costs $150 a year, which they are giving out free.
You can join the Six Apart Media advertising program and display high paying ads and keep the revenue. Six Apart will promote your new site on Blogs.com directory of the best in blogs. They can introduce you to the VIP program to help drive traffic to your site, help you connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile, make it easy to manage your site’s comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote your posts to your Facebook friends.
Anil Dash explains why Six Apart opted for bailing out journalists –
The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to singlehandedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won’t be able to accept every application at first. But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online. This program will let a lot of the most eager writers and reporters learn the ropes about how to be more effective and successful on the web.
If you are eligible, you can start by sending the link to your last piece for a newspaper, magazine or broadcast journalism venue to bailout@sixapart.com, and they will set you up for free.