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Comment by jeremymims | Hacker News Reader

None of these are the reasons that online news is broken.

Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content.

This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the ads. "Wow, look how much nicer it looks! We're totally saving journalism." They aren't. They don't have to pay to produce content, so they can repackage it inexpensively or for free.

The truth is more people are reading the news now than ever before. 16 million people read The New York Times online last month. The print publication peaks at just over 2,000,000 on Sundays.

We don't need better social crowdsourcing of stories. We need more ways to pay for great content.

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Jeremy is absolutely right here from the perspective of news organizations (which his company OwnLocal is trying help solve). There's a lot of experimentation going on - paywalls, porous paywalls, conferences and events (e.g. Techcrunch and the Atlantic), premium programs without paywalls (Reddit, Ars), sponsored content, syndication schemes, sponsored sections, etc.

But as for readers, while there's an evergrowing way to to discover, follow, and comment on news. HN, Reddit, Twitter, FB, among other social sites continue to grow. There's some algorithmic approaches to finding you personalized news (which has been tried MANY times), but there's a few good ones out there including Prismatic and the soon-to-be released Prismatic.

(Yes, I'm leaving out those who write for reasons other than direct money, but right now, online tools seem to be doing many of the quality writers pretty well - though I'm sure there are "C-list" bloggers who don't get the exposure they ought to).

So, the OP might be solving a portion of readers' problems - the overload and context problem, but Mims is dead-on -- the real problem with online news is how can you make enough money to pay smart people to write great stories in a world where advertisers have millions of other places to put their ads at prices much cheaper than what a news org needs to fund journalism like this: http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF

I completely agree with you. Putting a new UI on news won't fix it, neither will new ways of aggregating and sorting the stories that currently exist.

But there are two sides to the equation you mention, that revenue from ads needs to be greater than the cost of content. I love what your company (http://ownlocal.com) is doing, but I also don't think you should rule out the other side of the equation. What if a company can create a more compelling solution at a lower price? (That's what we're trying to do at http://grasswire.com).

It bothers me that the only paid model for content is to pay for the source. I enjoy some pieces the New York Times publishes, but I don't want to pay for the whole pipeline. I would however, be happy to pay something for individual pieces of quality content.

Additionally, much of the content I enjoy reading is produced by people not in it for the money, so there is no way to pay for it even if it did have monetary value to me.

nwzPaper.com launched a platform to emancipate the journalist and unbundle the content from the legacy aggregated subscription model.

The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this.

If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right.

If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn't matter so much because it doesn't affect your buy decision. And what people don't care about, gets shortchanged.

The internet has caused us to move from a subscription model to a piecemeal model, and the quality of news has suffered. But this is not new. A hundred years ago the "yellow press" was also on a piecemeal model. So, more recently, were British tabloids. And they were crap in the same way that the internet news today is crap.

Unless you're either relying on a third party curation that you trust, or are purchasing the brand, quality is going to suffer.

Subtle point, but your assumption (nearly everywhere else in this discussion as well) relies on paying for content before you've consumed it. I haven't heard much discussion on what happens if you remove that assumption.

If you could attach a frictionless transaction to a "Like" or "Kudos", I would be happy to pay $1 a pop or something reasonable for a well researched blog post after I've read it. Maybe not feasible for a wider public, but certainly might have niche acceptance.

People have pursued such donation based models.

Nobody has succeeded in making substantial money on a per item basis. However NPR manages to do it on a brand-based basis, but their signup rates are something like under 1% of their dedicated listeners. It isn't easy.

I agree that's the main reason online news is broken, and I started with that reason in my post. I'm proposing that the high quality content part won't be fixed, and see a possible alternative is us and our peers doing more work ourselves to provide the context that matters to us in our jobs.

Thanks for reading.

A great example of this working are the Kindle editions where I can take a publicly available blog with an RSS feed and yet still feel completely content paying for issues to be sent directly to my Kindle rather than writing scripts or using services to do the same task.

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