Your idea assumes that people know what they want to see before they see it, which seems pretty incompatible with reporting most of the news. That said, I think that's a cool project.
Another way to look at it would be to call it a news-room where people decide what they put into the news paper. I don't know how this works in real news papers, but maybe they hold a meeting and then the journalists decide what stories they pick up. People could get involved into that by voting for topics.
Choice in our news consumption is allowing people to believe that vaccines cause autism, that there's a "deep state" cabal of leaders secretly pulling the levers of power, that Russia didn't really interfere in the 2016 election. We no longer have to confront difficult truths, we can simply believe the version that we want to believe and ignore everything else.
Choice in our news consumption is giving rise to incompatible versions of what's going on, and it's setting a pretty terrifying precedent. How can you give people a choice of what they want to see while maintaining a standard of quality that rises above propaganda?
So I imagine if say 1000 people make a wish to get a story covered and they even fund the wish, and the wish is "make a very short summary of this... including the following points..." then they can earn money by delivering on that. The result might be a very short article where people spend only 10 seconds and with a boring title, but they would still earn money with that.
There's already a solution to this problem though: subscriptions. The issue there is that people just don't want to pay for something that they're used to getting for free.
Your idea sounds like a service where people can request content on a given topic for a fee, without really knowing who's creating the content. What are the quality controls there? Who gets to write the content? How do I, the user, know that I'm getting a fair representation of what's going on?
If someone is willing to pay for news content, why not just buy a newspaper subscription and get the email newsletter from a company that knows how to create news content?
I'm just another internet rando, but I've worked for news organizations so I have some operational background here. Frankly, I just don't quite see the value in the service you're imagining, based on my interpretation. I'd have a really hard time trusting content written by a stranger catered specifically to my preferences if they weren't a bona fide journalist with experience at a reputable news organization. And I certainly wouldn't pay for it. Such a system would be super vulnerable to malicious influential behavior like we saw in the 2016 election.
If you hate online ads in your news so much, do you currently pay for any of your news right now? If not, then how painful is this problem for you?
We can't convince the public to spend on their news content the same way they spend on Netflix. That kinda sums it up right there.
But again, relying purely on the community to verify quality is a major liability when it comes to information geared towards the public interest.
I highly recommend you read up on the fake political groups that the Russians created on Facebook and Twitter that generated hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of engagements. People just didn’t realize that they were fake groups while sharing their content/tweets. The mueller report covered this operation in great detail, it’s worth the read if you’re serious about building products like this.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...