YC 2010 startup needs journalists as early users | Hacker News Reader

YC 2010 startup needs journalists as early users

secretjournalismstartup.posterous.com

81 pointsstealthyc201051 comments

Interesting.

I have a few journalist friends (as no doubt do you guys) and pointed a couple of them at this.

Sure you've seen this already, but you'll probably find that a lot of your target market (well-trained but under-employed journalists) are quite bitter and resentful that they've been reduced to this. Despite the best intentions of startups like these, ultimately they just want someone who'll give them a honest day's pay on a stable basis to get on with what they love doing, writing well-crafted stories.

Not all journalists will necessarily be entrepreneurial sorts, and the ones that are will often be able to seek out geeky friends to help them out online anyway.

With that in mind, there are a lot of sites out there on the internet with too-good-to-be-true sounding propositions on how they can help you make money online, build an audience etc. Once burned twice shy with these sorts of operations - often it turns out they pay you peanuts to be a cog in the wheel of a SEO-spam factory which profits them more than anyone else. Even with the best intentions just to offer people better tools on a win-win basis, it's hard to avoid coming across as scammy or profiteering when dealing with people who're feeling unemployed and vulnerable career-wise.

So, I guess what I'm saying is you might really want to make sure you stand out from the crowd of "join our SEO-spam-factory and make pennies on the dollar for page impressions while we hoard pagerank" borderline-scams, both in the eyes of geeks and in the eyes of journalists who might not be able to tell the difference but just feel wary.

Would need branding and marketing that really speak to journalists in their own language, not in the language of the smug social media consultant telling them what they need to change about the way work THIS week in order to carry on making a pittance online :) (edit: not that you appear to be doing that at all)

(Also, speaking as a geek whose helped out journalists in the past, if the tools being offered lock you inextricably into some company's hosted ecosystem, I'd be a bit skeptical - I'd want tools I could use with an existing website where i have control - take google analytics for example - but I may not be your typical audience)

Anyway hope that didn't come across too negative, I'm glad more people are taking on what's such a tricky problem!

Problem is journalists looking for a stable income from a high quality operation won't jump on this because it's unproven but to prove this concept you need these quality journalists.

An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up readership.

I ran the numbers along with my regular publisher for doing something possibly similar (though only guessing based on what they are saying) here in the UK.

You could probably pick up solid but cheap freelancers to join in (one of the magazine the publisher owns encourages community generated content and quite a few tech writers got a start through it) simply because it would mean increased output for them (not being at capacity like super-pro writers generally are) and hence more money.

But it's so so hard to compete with what the print mags would pay. We talked to a few freelancers who said they wanted at least 50% of what they would get for print - but twice the uptake (i.e. twice as many articles). That's hundreds of dollars per article you have to shell out for a few months before advertising picks up to cover it.

I think it's going to be tough to do this.

I saw they were promising payments, elsewhere, of 30-70K. That is "serious writer" territory and they aren't going to get any of them.

It was the ultimate reason I haven't emailed what looks like an interesting idea - 70K is such a ludicrous promise it sounds like they barely know the talent pool :(

(though maybe US journalism works like that, I dont know)

We are aiming to get journalists a fair wage. We aren't promising payments of 30K-70K, but we needed numbers to put in the box on the Poynter site, so we put in our targets.

Do email us, you sound interesting. I'm paul [at] newslabs.com or paul.biggar [at] gmail.com.

Sorry I sounded so negative - now you've clarified things it looks a lot better. Your right the low profile thing probably worked against you, unfairly I guess.

I'll drop an email when I get chance.

We have many people interested. I haven't triaged them all, but there are high quality people in there. We don't need people to jump - there were 8000 journalists laidoff last year, and there are many many freelancers out there. The people interested are mixes of both, and some full timers who want to make money on the side, and are looking to jump online in the future.

I would love to pay out of investment, but we don't have it, so I'm not sure what we can do there.

> I have a few journalist friends (as no doubt do you guys) and pointed a couple of them at this.

Thanks for doing that. I hope you'll point them at this comment too.

> [...] you'll probably find that a lot of your target market quite bitter and resentful that they've been reduced to this. [...] they just want someone who'll give them a honest day's pay on a stable basis to get on with what they love doing, writing well-crafted stories.

Yes. We talked to a ton of journalists before we got to this. Everyone had the same story (many bitter) that you outlined above. We are honestly not trying to screw anyone. We should have outlined the financials a bit better: 80% of all revenue goes to the content producers. This is a platform for journalists to earn a good living, not for us to exploit anyone.

We want to provide a good living to people who write good content.

> Not all journalists will necessarily be entrepreneurial sorts, and the ones that are will often be able to seek out geeky friends to help them out online anyway.

We're trying to add value for both kinds, not just the ones who can't work the internet.

> With that in mind, there are a lot of sites out there on the internet with too-good-to-be-true sounding propositions on how they can help you make money online, build an audience etc. Once burned twice shy with these sorts of operations - often it turns out they pay you peanuts to be a cog in the wheel of a SEO-spam factory which profits them more than anyone else.

We have come across a number of these - we dont want to name names - but we are the opposite. I guess the fact that we were trying to keep on the down-low made it seem sinister. Just the opposite - we are open sourcers and believe in transparency. It will be trivial to calculate how much revenue your content has brought it: multiply by 1.25.

> Even with the best intentions just to offer people better tools on a win-win basis, it's hard to avoid coming across as scammy or profiteering when dealing with people who're feeling unemployed and vulnerable career-wise.

Right, this is an important point. We'll work hard to make it seem like we aren't scammy at all (cause we aren't!).

> So, I guess what I'm saying is you might really want to make sure you stand out from the crowd of "join our SEO-spam-factory"

Noted. We had hoped the YC brand would make us stand out from spammy-bastards, but I guess not.

> [...] if the tools being offered lock you inextricably into some company's hosted ecosystem, I'd be a bit skeptical [...]

We are wary of this. We will build tools to automatically move off our platform. It wont be our first priority of course, but if people want to move off we will help them do it.

> Anyway hope that didn't come across too negative, I'm glad more people are taking on what's such a tricky problem!

Positive people won't tell you that you may be coming across as a spammy bastard :) Thanks!

Couldn't find any info regarding your market. Are you launching worldwide right away? Journalism tends to be a fairly local thing, so targeting the right market is of some importance.

There isn't anything about our market, because we're not specific to any of them. If you are a journalist, write about what you are interested in. So far, we've had interest from people who write about finance, about tech, about gaming, and lots and lots of local journalists.

So long as you don't plan on lumping them all together into one big amorphous news website that tries to cater to all tastes but has no real editorial focus or voice. Give them tools to find / understand / build their own audience.

Sounds like you're on the right track there though.

Journalism: Based on bringing transparency. Secretjournalismstartup: Clouded in secrecy.

While this dichotomy has always been present in news media (some ink-stained retches, including yours truly, will protect scoops and anonymous sources to the grave), not knowing who is really behind this beyond people "funded and advised by YCombinator, the people behind Reddit, posterous, and Justin.tv" doesn't encourage faith. Maybe the mystique will make up for it.

Based on the submitter's username, stealthyc2010, it should be clear that the startup is still in "stealth mode". This is somewhat common in the tech startup world. The veil will almost assuredly be lifted before they launch.

I completely understand that, and tried to make my comment come as a critique rather than a criticism. Two of the most important factors in how much people trust news, however, is a) the source's reputation and b) who is paying for its generation, and how.

Asking journalists to potentially sign on without disclosing the latter can be a risky professional move for them, which could have a negative effect on the venture's success.

Agreed. I write a reasonable amount of freelance print tech copy and have been looking for something interesting like this to move online.

But the secrecy is putting me right off :(. I guess they will give you more insight via email.

(getting into serious online journalism is pretty hard btw)

We were only trying to be secret to not build hype when the product isn't ready. Backfire! We hope you aren't put off. We are going to be as open and transparent as we can be.

(I should point out in that case that I'm only using this name for consistency. I'm pbiggar on HN.)

any reason to hide that you're http://newslabs.com/? same phone number on both pages.

And http://www.replie.com/

Our original name. God I hated that, glad its gone.

Don't you think that this lacks courtesy to post a comment rather than just email them? I mean, if there were a reason (and I can think of at least 3) then you just ignored it.

FWIW I think most people would google for the phone number. I did.

Trying to be stealth is just an invitation for everyone to start googling to find out all they can.

Yes, but there is a difference between being curious and finding out whatever you can, and posting the results of that search to a public forum - especially when the word "secret" is in the contact email address. It just seems a little unnecessarily unkind.

I suspect it never really occured the grandfather - because there wasnt really any secrecy, this is a community that generally scoffs on secrecy as "a bit silly really" and there appeared to be no harm in spreading possibly interesting knowledge.

Not deliberately malicious I am sure.

I was going to post it too but checked myself at the last minute.

Sorry if I broke HN-etiquette, I'm rather new around here.

My impression is that "Ask HN" questions call for more nuanced interplay, while links are intellectual free-for-alls where it's assumed that everyone (including, if not especially the OP) comes armed for probing discussions.

Sincerely speaking - should that not be my expectation? Feel free to e-mail me as well (unlike stealthyc2010 my e-mail is listed).

We were all new here once. No hard feelings :)

We were just trying to avoid building hype until we had more built. Whoops.

I'm no expert on this area, but from what I've seen ad revenues are nowhere near high enough to pay for decent journalism. If they were we wouldn't have the pay-wall debate.

Affiliate links tend to be a huge no-no because of conflicts of interest.

Publications generally only buy articles if they have first right of publication.

Suggesting someone can earn 30K-70K on the above basis seems over-optimistic to the point of being misleading.

Yes, we'll be working on the ad revenues. They certainly aren't high enough to support a massive media organization. They should be high enough to support a low-overhead one-man journalism show.

There are other revenue streams, too. It remains to be seen which is the best for us.

<JOKE>

How nice of them: you focus on the content. We handle making money

</JOKE>

That's the bitterness that the top commenter here referred to. The journalists I know are largely resigned to being crapped on by whoever they work for. They create all the value (similar to a programmer at a startup run by biz-ev guys) while someone makes the money and then gives them a small piece of it. They're use to getting crapped on like this.

That said, they're really picky about who they let crap on them. Someone might let the HuffPo crap on them so they can share space with celebrities and get lots of hits on their story. Someone might let the NYTimes crap on them, because, it's the New York Times!

So if this startup's going to run the same game, they'll need to have a good reason for journalists to want to get crapped on by them.

No-one is being crapped on here. I've updated the CFJ to hopefully make that a lot clearer.

I think you nailed it. Essentially, what they are up to is to automate the content production, because that could make them (not those journalists) rich. Demand Media did it with how-to articles using SEO, now these guys wants to do that with journalism. Much harder task, IMHO. Good luck...

The YC motto: make something people want. Journalists do not want to be exploited for pennies, so that is not a product we would be involved in.

I would not be happy getting rich by exploiting others, and newslabs won't be involved in anything like that.

Nothing sinister here. We give journalists 80% of the _revenue_ from their content. We can make it up on volume. I updated the CFJ to be clearer.

I have founded a group called Hacks/Hackers at http://hackshackers.com bringing together journalists and technologists -- sounds like a good fit with what you're doing. Let's get in touch -- also glad to hear from anyone else here interested in this space!

Can a centralized source provide all the specialized technical support and services a real web living news agency will need? Alternatively would Huffington Post and Techcrunch be willing to add to their tech team by paying for this service?

The only differentiators I can see are: "Lead generation: get tips from your readers automatically get sources for your stories find out what stories people want to hear about, before they know themselves! Collaborate with other journalists."

The other services (submit links, show ads) have questionable value. I have high hopes for a model like this though. I was looking for an open source model like a dedicated Wordpress though.

I'm really interested to see how they'll handle liability. If they want to make a lot of money, I'm going to guess the founders won't be vetting anything before it gets published. However, if they're pushing it on Reddit, writing the checks, selling the stuff to other publishers, I'd find it hard to see a DMCA claim holding up. At that point they're doing a lot more than for their content creators than Youtube or Scribd, making them accomplices in any libel lawsuit that might come up.

Will they go to the wall for one of their writers? Doubtful.

So do they have a new angle on the legal side of things?

Interesting question. I'm guessing since you ask about the DCMA you're asking about copyright. Well, we'll vet all our writers, and it should be no problem at all. We'll also delay payment of new writers so that there is no way to do some kind of grab-and-dash.

Its also much much much easier to search for copyrighted material in text than in video or flash content. I can't imagine solving this will be a hard problem.

Why limit the search to journalists? If my understanding is correct, Arrington didn't have any prior experience in the news industry before Techcrunch.

Its not strictly limited to journalists, but its focus will be news, and we're looking to restrict the authors to high quality writers.

While I expect to widen the platform to all comers in the long term, we'll be very careful how we do it. It'll be our equivalent of reddit's search for how to do subreddits well, and Facebook figuring out how to let everyone in.

The are too many sites which are generic content repositories trying to eek ad revenue from google searches. We are a place of quality journalism.

"Eke", you meant? Since you're "a place of quality journalism", you may want to fix that.

P.S. As you can see, I'm not only a quality writer, but a quality proofreader as well. Feel free to get in touch.

Done, thanks. Who needs spell checking when you have HN :)

I'd also capitalise "google". I know it can be a verb, but you're using it here as a noun.

They're advertising for journalists on Poynter. That's definitely the place to do it! Well-played.

http://careers.poynter.org/jobdetail.cfm?job=3311446

"30 openings. ... while this isn't a paid position, we only earn money if you do. (So the 30K-70K is an estimate, not a concrete figure)."

Could be Mahalo or similar based on that text?

But the journalists here are doing more than copy and paste.

Looks like you are addressing problem [3] as explained in "Startup ideas we did like to fund" (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html). Excellent!

Hi folks, we're NewsLabs (pbiggar and nchong on HN). We never intended to use secrecy to hype stuff up, just to be a bit quiet until we had more built.

So it's a YC version of TrueSlant.com? Could be cool! Good luck, guys!

Yeah, similar alright. We have different outlook. The writers for our site aren't "contributors". Rather, they are the stars and we are providing a service to them.

Great area to work on =)

Cool!

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