Comment by jkldotio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkldotio | Hacker News Reader

This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts. I don't believe there is a real way around the corrupting influence of trying to maximize clicks when there are ads.

My site is looking to bring in the underused resources of think tanks, academics, NGOs and partisan blogs to put flesh around the bones of the core journalistic reporting on politics and economics.

As the old proverb goes "small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas". We can select against people (celebrity) with classifiers, and surround events (broadsheet news) with deeper discussion of ideas (policy, research, philosophy).

However, if you don't have ads you don't have money. So my project, http://igg.me/at/jkl/ , is largely unfunded. You can see a very basic prototype here as well: http://jkl.io

> This is why I am trying to build a non-profit news site with no adverts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

BBC is only entirely 'non-profit' within the confines of the UK.

Flip on a VPN and you hit the BBC World version of the BBC news, complete with adverts.

Besides which, competition is healthy - so I applaud the creation of another another non-profit news site.

Not quite the same as that's mostly just news/events in the middle of the spectrum. Having Will Self on to rant about things occasionally doesn't really equal bringing in think tanks, academics and NGOs.

So if I am funded I will go well beyond the BBC site for politics and economics. Considering I am only asking for $40k and they have a budget of four billion pounds I think it's a reasonable proposition.

That said - because the UK spends four billion on the BBC, Australia spends one billion dollars on public broadcasting and there are things like PBS, subsidized journalists in France etc. - I think it's not unreasonable to use them as the backbone for the news part. Going up the continuum though they are unequipped to do the higher policy/ideas part.

Edit: The BBC also has its own biases, they refuse to release the Balen Report for example. Also, as a British citizen not in the UK, I can't access a huge amount of political content without a VPS because iPlayer is restricted.

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