Comment by mjw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjw | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 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.

> 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!

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