YC’s NewsTilt Aims To Help Journalists Create A Business Model For Content | Hacker News Reader

YC’s NewsTilt Aims To Help Journalists Create A Business Model For Content

techcrunch.com

I have to say this is a brilliant idea. Currently, smart readers (like me!) have more allegiance to particular writers and journalists that they know are good than a newspaper or a magazine. So it makes complete sense for good writers to strike out on their own and not be tied down to the capital intensive and debt ridden newspapers.

And of course this is better than the usual blogging platform, because if they can establish themselves as having quality content they can eventually get more money or even provide a subscription model for some of their more popular journalists.

I see one problem however. The major thing that hounds all newspapers is libel suits and the like. It is not clear whether this type of service is responsible for the stuff written by its member journalists. However, all those statements about how they have editors and control their content editorially can certainly be used by some clever lawyer to say that the company is liable for any damages committed by any of its journalists.

I don't know if I'm reading it wrong or techcrunch missed some details but this just sounds like wordpress/blogger + "for journalists"...

So you're saying it's a hugely successful product, adapted and tailored for a specific niche that doesn't generally have the know-how to do it themselves.

Sounds like a winner to me.

Sounds much more hands-on than that to me, almost like a record label or book publisher.

...or a newspaper. What they've done is hire a bunch of journalists to write blogs.

Still, there're plenty of interesting things you could do with a network of strong brands beyond Adsense. I'm guessing the 80% Adsense revenue is just to give the journalists something now for building their brands.

Its 80% of all revenue, and adsense is just the simplest thing to go with right now. We're in talks with multiple other revenue streams, mostly for syndication, and better ad rates. Stay tuned.

Unfortunately, neither of those two businesses seem to be doing particularly well either.

Right, but with a much better revenue share.

There are entire teams of people working at the big papers whose job is to ensure that they dominate the search results for their category. If these guys can find a way to deliver Class-A search traffic to their sites, they'll be in good shape.

Amongst the many features we offer in the "you couldn't find the time to do it yourself, but we'll do it for you" category, is SEO.

I was going to say the same thing. I think they will offer value added things like advertising which was mentioned in the article. But the automated web site creation sounds exactly like what wordpress is doing.

This is, I'm assuming, a startup responding to RFS 1: The Future of Journalism (http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html).

Surprisingly, we came about another way. We actually applied to YC with a sort of Disqus clone designed for newspaper. We slowly migrated over to this after talking to lots of journalists over a couple of months.

I wasn't sure how long you guys have been in stealth mode, so I thought you might've applied before the RFSs came out.

News is all about the brand. This is just a reset for the industry, and chance for writers to entirely absolve themselves from the old management model and old media entities, and create new, light-weight unencumbered news brands. The fact that they are being strict with writers and editors means that they actually care about quality -- just like Apple.

I was with you til the last three words.

Given the even point spread over the comments on this thread, the verdict is still out. Something's going to work, and I haven't found it yet so it will be interesting how this pans out. I definitely would want something where I can grab the headlines I like and the ability to drill down deeper in the articles.

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