FOXSports.com auctions off columnist job

FOXSports.com has auctioned of the opportunity to be a NASCAR columnist for $310 on eBay to someone from Los Angeles. FOXSports.com plans to run the column and promote it on Fox Sports Net — something FoxSports.com has been doing for some time now (see past winners). Some in the journalism communityare complaining that FoxSports.com has come up with a cheap new way to get witers — by having them pay for the privelege rather than having to pay them — and that it demeans the journalism industry. But one must see this for what it is — a clever marketing ploy that at the same time gets readers involved in the product at the same time, which isn’t such a bad idea. New site should always be looking at ways the Web can help incorporate reader voices. As J.D. Mullane puts it in fun parody of the complaints on PhillyBurbs.com, “This seriously smug approach to journalism may be why newspaper circulation is flat or shrinking across the nation, and why young people have been abandoning newspapers for other media for three decades. And why serious, highly trained journalists will become the endangered species.”