Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Ugh. The punchline is the same TechCrunch "Apple Tablet" rumor that JUST WON'T DIE. It's like the HN version of a Rickroll.
(edit: The Game)
A news article is usually read once then never re-read. How do I know if the article is worth paying for without reading it? And why would I pay for it after I've read it or heard the information?
EDIT: For clarification, if there is something I could do, then I would care. Since I live in NW Ohio, crime that happens anyplace other than NW Ohio is not important to me. There is nothing I can do about a crime that occurred outside of my locality. When the national media reports on such topics, they are simply sensationalizing a tragic event for their own self-interests. It disgusts me. They view death and tragedy as a commodity to expend for the sake of profits.
Take for instance this headline currently on CNN: A helicopter has crashed on the campus of Texas A&M University, authorities say.
Is this tragic? Yes. Is this truly noteworthy as a national topic? No. Why does this receive attention? Do you think that this was the only accident today? This is a prime example of the sensationalization I mention. If you run a search with Google News on "plane crash" several other crashes come up. They are covered by the local stations. Why does an arbitrary helicopter crash in Texas make the national news? Pure sensationalism.
Sorry I have edited so much, but this is a topic that infuriates me.
I can be pretty cold myself from time to time, but if that's what you mean that's pretty heartless.
Okay, 90% of child kidnapping directly involves someone in the family - first thing the police should do, hunt down everyone in the family haul them in and tell them it's a crime to leave the state without court permission. Then you've only got 1 out of 10 cases where the suspect isn't already in your custody! Those cases, I'll watch on the news; I don't care when some hillbilly family starts kidnapping each others kids.
It's a shame it's taken the New York Times to get to the brink of destruction, but I believe almost every newspaper company is going to get to that point before they realize they need to change... just I think most won't adapt fast enough.
The record companies have always charged for their music; getting free music has always been theft.
Newspaper websites (excluding the WSJ) have always been free.
The comparison to the two would only be valid if the record companies had offered music for free at first, then wanted to start charging.
The newspaper organizations have set up a business model that simply doesn't work: they have established the value of a news article to be free. That's nearly impossible to change ex post facto.
The only chance I see of this changing is if some of the major players drop out, making a real shortage of good news stories. That might inflate their value enough that they could start charging effectively.
But everyone forgets about radio. Disturbingly this gives record companies more ammo to shut down internet radio (which annoys me as its the only radio I listen to now - and I am happy for it to have ads in it).
I'm less concerned about the newspapers than the journalists. Pandora probably won't help the music labels, in the long run, but it seems like it helps the artists, who gain listeners from communities that might not otherwise.
That isn't an option with kindle.
The notion that newspapers are still spending money on multi-million dollar presses and bloated newsrooms is what's really idiotic.
To see evidence of this go look at your local paper. Mine writes about (not syndicates...writes) national news all of the time.
Small to medium sized papers shouldn't be doing this anymore. They should be focusing on their local communities and dominating that market.
By bloat I mean purchasing multi-million dollar printing presses in 2005 (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-108017775.html) when you should be investing heavily in your local and online markets.
Show me a "small" paper with 60 reporters.
Show me a "small" paper with 25 reporters covering national news.
Your local paper has 40% of its reporters covering national news?
How does Drudge make money? (These are two very distinct questions.)
What do people want that they are not getting from the media now?
At outside.in we're indexing and organizing local news across the US and have recently started partnering with national news sources (like nbc) to fill gaps in our index and to provide them with the local coverage that they're missing. Along with providing their users a new way to find and read news (by putting it on a map, for example.)
Eventually, it will be a combination of both major media and citizen journalists covering issues that are important. What compounds the problem for the newspapers is that people have stopped consuming news the same way they were doing it 5-10 years ago. The internet has obviously played a big part in this, but so have changing social patterns and expectations on the part of the consumer on news availability.
The bigger shift we're noticing that people are actively searching for topics they're interested in, as opposed to flipping through a newspaper, they want to see things they may be tangentially interested in ('crime', in 'Brooklyn') but had no way to get to earlier.
It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.
My concern with what you guys do is that you've spent the last few years "indexing" everyone else's content...without hardly sending anyone to the original sites themselves.
I explained this to one of your biz-dev guys a few months back, so I see no need to do so here but I'll restate a few points.
I added my publication's RSS feed to outside.in several months ago. Since then, my biggest day of referrals from you guys has been 6 visitors/24 hours according to Google analytics. Big whoop.
Meanwhile, how many Google hits did you get from my content? From everyone else's content? Feel free to call me wrong with data, but I imagine Outside.in is an SEO machine and that Google accounts for most of your traffic.
How is this helping the publishers you "index"? It's been very, very clear from day one how it's helping outside.in.
Your business-development guy told me you're hatching partnerships with major newspapers to put "publisher" content on their sites. Will those links lead back to the original publishers? Or will they point back to the summary page on Outside.in?
There are now a handful of players doing this between you, Everyblock, YourStreet...even the Huffington Post with its local channels.
And not one of them sends any actual traffic back to the sites they index. Meanwhile their traffic numbers go up, up, up, the VC money rolls in, and the publishers themselves keep on spiraling down.
People rip on Digg all the time. But I tell you what, Digg actually sends bodies through the door. Same with reddit and other sites like this. Sure, they probably get a lot of Google hits that would otherwise go to the original sites, but they focus on sending people along to the original stories. They profit from the ecosystem of good content and then contribute back to help new sites sprout up.
Adrian
The newspaper deals we're doing also send ALL the traffic back to the blogger, check one out here: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/neighborhoods/?neighborhood_id=179...
Two links going back to the blogger for every one link to outside.in!
You started trolling so I had to repsond, but our goal (along with EB and everyone else in our space) is to get the content more distribution, as I said above, there is a huge gap that the major news publishers have in local news and the faster that gets filled up the better it is for both producers and consumers.
Maybe the solution is phone based. What if you could call a phone number and hear the news read to you by a good narrator? By pressing keys you could drill down into Tech, World, blogs etc. It would be an opinionated filter of news, essays, wikipedia. Like this http://audiothink.com/concept1.png. With twilio you could <play> .mp3s. First time callers could maybe get x minutes free after which point they'd pay for their callerID to continue working. Not sure how to handle payments - sending phone visitors to a web page might kill conversion. I think bored commuters with hands-free devices and cell minutes to burn might use such a service.
I'm pretty satisfied with Minnesota Public Radio and its all-news nework, exemplified by KNOW FM in St. Paul.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/nis/
I'm still learning about Minnesota Public Radio's availability as a stream on the Internet or as podcasts, but in general that radio network tries to keep up to date with the latest technology. This is, of course, not commercial radio but rather "listener supported" radio that will hit you up with fundraising drives every once in a while.
I don't know if this is the solution, but here's one idea I had around this problem that I keep coming back to. It's a way to combine the disciplined process of a traditional news agency with the economies of scale and spirit of the citizen journalism movement: http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/y-combinator-ch...
They don't need anyone to 'save them', they just need the balls to ask a fair price for good content. Of course, if most newspapers are just publishing badly written stories with little depth, maybe people wont be willing to pay for it.
I beg to differ. OSS and GNU/Linux are perfect examples of the contrary.
Whilst that is not a business in the same sense, there is business around enough to make it worth while.
For example, I have no interest whatsoever in the latest fight happening in the middle east. However, the TV news insists in spending >50% if its international coverage time telling me about this.
Journalism follows a model from the last two centuries, and it will take a long time to change. Perhaps it will lose relevance completely, when compared to blogs and other web sources.
Have you read much "citizen journalism?"
Have you tried to look to local neighborhood blogs to find out what's happening in your town?
Here in Chicago there's one blog that does a decent job of this, http://www.uptownupdate.com
But its a labor of love. What happens if the writer gets ill and has to take a break for a month or two? Who's covering Uptown then?
There are a few other neighborhood blogs like it that don't update more than once or twice a week or that are filled with hateful invective.
Or let's look at it this way: Did you learn about the in's and out's of the latest Pentagon policies from your wacky neighbor up the street?
Citizen journalism should really be called "amateur journalism" and treated as such. Valuable, valuable things can come from amateurs: photos, facts, reports etc. But amateur news services....are not news services.
I think another hope to look to is a growing public understanding of the problem. As the news situation sinks in with the most people, I hope it will become a point of honor to pay for quality reporting, and I hope there will be easy avenues to channel this money.
And if your definition of CJ is rubbish, then we need search engines and aggregators set in place to help us filter through the crap. Still, this isn't part of the mainstream sources.
And I'm having a hard time seeing how you are rationalizing that news orgs like CNN or NBC are not comprised of iffy product placement and factual errors. They report what they want you to hear, not what you want to hear. Fox News, for how much of a news organization than a tabloid they are, reports factual errors on a constant basis. Product placement, have you ever watched the filler crap that CNN or any of them show during the slow news days? Sanjay Gupta, who works for CNN, has continuiously promoted big pharma companies that he has financial interests in.
Every news organization, no matter what its name, is biased in one way or another. They have to sell ad revenue or else they'll go off the air, so they show you what they want you to hear. Not what you want to hear. This is where citizen/independent journalism shines and is also a reason why newspapers are failing. People have found out that there are better sources of news out there than what you get through your television or off the newsstands.
-"The term "citizen journalism" does not have to mean "your wacky neighbor up the street". What about the, few, independent journalists working out there."
There's a difference between an independent journalist and a citizen journalist. The terms are not interchangeable.
Josh Marshall (TPM) is an independent journalist. He is not a citizen journalist. He does this for a living and lives off the fruit of it. Arrington is not a citizen journalist either. I agree that independent journalists (essentially, journalism startups) will become increasingly important. But that's different from citizen journalism.
Furthermore, while many citizen journalists are independent, I would argue that many aren't. What about the folks uploading to CNN's iReport? They're working for the mainstream press.
-"I'm having a hard time seeing how you are rationalizing that news orgs like CNN or NBC are not comprised of iffy product placement and factual errors."
There are instances of sketchy product placement and certainly factual errors in the mainstream press.
However, there are also mechanisms for dealing with these when they're exposed. People lose their jobs. Have their pay docked. Get moved to other assignments. Lose face with the public. They also get sued...all the time.
Citizen Journalism, on the other hand, is, by definition, the wild west.
I am constantly underwhelmed by the stuff I read on blogs and on Twitter. It's all marketing. And it's often disguised as editorial. Ever been to a "tweet-up"? The one's I've attended consisted of dozens of people talking about how to talk to people on twitter. Ugh.
The mainstream media screws up all the time. But at least there's people there committed to NOT screwing up.
As per your last point...what are these "better sources of news" that you speak of? I'm always interesting in finding new stuff to read. If you've got some great links, please share them.
So I think we're on the same page regarding independent journalists. We're only going to see more Talking Points Memo's and the like.
But I'm still very skeptical about citizen journalism as a tranformative force unto itself, based on months of watching the local scene here in Chicago. There are some great blogs here, but none that are really capable of carrying the torch for a newspaper if it went under.