Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

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   Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, 
   investigative journalism isn’t brought to the attention 
   of general audiences it can never have the effect that 
   actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new 
   entity — they have a name but they’re not releasing it, 
   so I will just call it NewCo — will have to serve the    
   interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a  
   niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, 
   entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.

Can't disagree more with this. The only reason news outlets currently have to cover all of that stuff is that they're still trying to act like the newspapers and TV/radio stations they replaced. When you had only one or two newspapers in town, and only two or three TV channels within range of your rabbit ears, the news business was necessarily a general one. There is no reason at all to impose this model on the Web, and there are a lot of reasons not to.

I agree with Omidyar here. Not that I'm particularly interested in sports and entertainment: when I read the paper on line, I go straight to whatever I'm interested in (often politics, econ, etc..). Nevertheless, I thing one of the goal of this new venture is to make sure as many people as possible are aware of what's wrong with political powers. A gross restatement of their objective would be: make sure the people feeding on Fox News get another source of information, a reliable one. So they're practicing a foot-in-the-door technique: provide quality journalism for popular topics, and hope that when people browse their site, they will be more likely to stumble on important news they would otherwise have missed.

More generally, I'm very excited and hopeful about this project. It is a truly innovative experiment in an aging industry, and I hope it succeeds. For the first time in my life I'm considering subscribing to a newspaper..

I have similar interests but understand the need for fluffy diversions. To a point.

The biggest problem for me in consuming real news is rage fatigue -- so much unnecessary stupidity, pain, and greed makes it hard to digest after a while.

There's power in unbundling and there have certainly been some great success stories in niche / topical publications online... but at the same time there's a reason why we-do-a-little-bit-of-everything news sites still attract a huge audience. People often aren't looking for anything in particular to read, just something, and that's a really good platform from which to do investigative work, if you want people to actually see it. There's a reason why ProPublica, probably the best investigative unit out there, routinely partners with newspapers in lieu of just putting things on their own websites: many more people will see it, and that matters.

I think you misunderstand why the "soft" sections of the newspaper exist. Real estate, automobile, and lifestyle sections are all very profitable in terms of what they can charge advertisers, and I would guess technology and business are similar. In effect, the typical news organizations run a cross-subsidy by which advertising in the "soft" sections subsidizes the "hard" news, while the latter drives the reputation which builds the readership. It seems to me that this logic applies equally well to any advertising-driven media organization, no matter the medium.

Indeed, the internets do seem to be trending towards highly focused niches rather than broad services like before.

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