News is so broken | Hacker News Reader

News is so broken

10 pointsCheeese9 comments

Looking for a developer to join me on my mission to fix news!

News seems to be broken and I want to try and fix that. I want to create a place that offers a simple way to follow and find the stuff that you care about, presented in a way that is easy to scan and consume. The second part of this idea is I want to build discussion around news items, as a story unfolds it gets more context and is curated in one place. The idea is in its early stages, but I do have a screenshot to share with you that gives you a very clear idea of where I am going with this

I am looking for a developer to join me building this idea. I am willing to share equity and am ideally looking for a co-founder to work alongside with. I don't really mind too much where you are located, but we are based in Melbourne, Australia. Beyond being a great coder we are looking for someone who is on the same wave length and can add value to the idea when it comes to user experience. Our technology stack is Java and JSP running on the App engine.

About me: I am a designer that has been in the industry for some time now. I believe in UX and simplicity. You can find some of my work here: http://www.jasonstrachan.com

If you are interested please contact me and I will share with you some screen-shots of the idea: oneintenthousand@gmail.com

Cheers, Jason

Out of interest how does your idea differ from reddit, digg, hacker news or many of the other social news sites currently around? they all offer methods of easily scanning & consuming content as well as allowing discussions. I do agree that there are issues with our current methods of consuming news but I think there needs to be a much more significant paradigm shift than what you are proposing.

I am however very happy to be corrected, could you provide a little more information?

I can imagine when I talk about this stuff you are thinking digg, reddit etc. But its quite different to that.

The biggest difference is this is a competitor to traditional news (New York Times, CNN) and not digg and reddit.

I believe we are going to share some of the mechanics that drive digg, but where this is very different is when you view story it is not a link to someone else's content - the content lives within the context of the site.

Also I will say that the idea is not fully formed yet and needs some more thought. The biggest problem is how the content gets curated and how it gets seeded.

I found intriguing this part of what you said:

as a story unfolds it gets more context and is curated in one place

I've been dismayed in the past that we hear a news report, and the interest dies out before it's resolved, so we never learn what actually happened.

It seems that this is because the delivery mechanism for MSM is always serialized and episodic.

If a way could be found to communicate an issue, event, etc., as a single entity throughout its lifecycle, allowing us to watch developments, reaction, resolution, etc., so I could go back and see if, e.g., the corrupt legislator really got prison time, or how many Haitians remain homeless after the recent earthquake, I think I'd be a lot more satisfied.

I think that in one way, Google Wave can address some of this. But it's still lacking the indexing and discoverability aspects.

Curating content in one place is going to be compelling, that's definably going to be a big part of this. Conceptually that's a big change from traditional news where a journalist publishes a piece and ends the conversation while things are still unfolding. Its the equivalent to walking out the room while you are in the middle of a conversation with someone.

You mention wanting to be a NYT/CNN/etc competitor instead of competing with digg/reddit/etc. Does this mean you want to be a news producer instead of a news aggregator? Or are you just looking for intelligence behind how you aggregate news (something closer to newsvine?) Also what sort of news? Big breaking headlines? Feature stories (research-based)? "Hyperlocal" news (like everyblock)?

If you're doing "intelligent aggregation" and wanting the content to live within the context of your site, as you say, I think you've got a copyright nightmare ahead of you. There are several sites out there that do nothing but pull together AP content and smother the pages with ads -- I think a few of them are making enough profits to cover the outrageous cost of the AP feeds.

I'm not trying to discredit your idea -- just hoping to get some more details. I happen to work in the news industry (on the software side, but am still exposed to the mess that is news) and find ideas in this area intriguing.

Are you thinking something along the lines of http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ with better recommendations and perhaps some way of following stories as the unfold?

I agree that news consumption is broken and there are lots of opportunities for new entrants, but I'm not sure what the "right way" is - I, for one, spend way too much time sifting through news, blogs, tweets, FB updates etc etc and probably still miss a lot of interesting stuff while reading stuff I don't really care about.

- Gummi

When I say we will compete with NYT/CNN I mean that those are the users we hope to attract, I am not saying we will use that model. User generated content and content aggregation both need to be there to make a compelling experience.

I don't want to replicate anything that has been done previously, I think we are all trying to figure this out and its going to be an interesting ride.

And thanks for the insightful comments, there are some really smart motivated people here.

Am I right in thinking it would work something like Wikipedia news articles but with discussions, etc. added on ?

That's a big part of it, but the piece that's missing is seeding news stories as they break.

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