YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism
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Look at Drudge Report for case in point: Drudge Report is one of the most successful news websites out there, and it is completely powered by editorial vision. Also, The Washington Post, WSJ (online), and The Economist are doing well because readers value the content. They aren't doing anything drastically different in terms of business models or distribution methods.
All the newspapers with poor content are going under for a good reason IMO. Let it happen, no one needs to save them. A handful of programmers from YC aren't going to shape the future of journalism, journalists will.
Newspaper aren't meant to be editorial soapboxes. They, along with journalists, are meant to be just objective and factual. Having an editorial vision is a breach of journalistic integrity. So that said, a successful journalism venture of the future requires a balance of reporters, editors, and writers but anything too opinionated might make you (Fox News) or break you (when you reveal too much of your bias or it goes counter to what the popular opinion is).
Personally I really like Talking Points Memo model of collecting and analyzing news. They've been building quite a lean and fast organization to capitalize on all the future of news.
In a world where all the newspapers are owned by the same people who make nuclear weapons and prisons, the surest path to profitability is to support the status quo; the phrase 'journalistic integrity' is just a form of plausible deniability, propaganda to distract you from the truth.
First, often there's no canonical truth. Was the Honduras "coup" a coup or a functional democracy? It's pretty hard to report on it without deciding. The more detail you include, the more you'll come out in favour of the democratic argument, the less, the more you make it sound like a coup (there's no point of including all the details of the parliament deliberating if the essence is that the military took over in a coup).
Second, there's deciding what news to report. There was some criticism of the media focusing much more on set-backs of US forces in Iraq, and only casually reporting progress - the media loosing interest in Iraq. How do you decide what to report from Iraq without letting your own opinion of the war influence you? I can't see how.
I also can't see how you can reliably report on complex political issues without having a deep passion for these issues - and I believe that no one can be deeply impassioned about e.g. the Iraq war without forming an opinion that will be at odds with at least some.
The solution: Quit pretending. Have an opinion. Care about what you write about, and let it show. Stop competing on "most fair" and "least biased", but on "best arguments".
So what I would do would be to build a platform for local news agencies of the future.
Define all the local news sources out there: Police Info, Fire Dept. Info, Local Events, etc… Then provide software (web based I would assume) that would allow a business of a few people to set up shop in a small town (or more likely cluster of towns) and deliver the local news. They would have to make the actual deals with the Police depts., Fire Depts, Local Convention Centers, et al. to provide the info but you could make a thriving business just by selling them pre-made software that makes collecting that info easy.
Distributing that news is another area. Again, the paper part probably isn't going to live on. But local agencies could easily make their money off of websites if those web sites were done well. I personally would bundle distribution with the content collection software but you could probably make some money just off software that would create a professional website. Say that supports syndication and is viewable on mobile phones (keep in mind most small businesses are still paying thousands to con men to design static web sites). Allow for alternate distribution like sms alerts and you could have an even more viable product.
You'll have to pardon the long reply but the point I'm making is one that Microsoft made years ago which is the real money in technology is made by those who create software that empowers others.
So everyblock.com seems to be a statistical listing of things happening but what I was trying to describe was a system that feeds relevant info to the journalists so they're able to focus on writing articles that add insight to that news (which is really what a news organization is for)
We can build things like Wordpress VIP, but ultimately it's up to CNN to provide the content that makes or breaks the final product.
The Internet is the new printing press. Paper is out, and bits are in. I think what PG is asking for is some kind of magical printing press. Changing the way failing newspapers' content is displayed, viewed, organized, ranked, etc. is not going to save them.
Whatever your idea might be in this market, I think it needs to be centered around delivering content that people actually want.
My friend and I applied to YC with a next-gen news aggregator idea (but didn't get accepted). Our idea was to create an individually tailored news feed from users' preferences. Kind of like an RSS feed that is built and filtered for you from the comfort of an easy to use web interface. I think something like this would be the future. I would like a computer to figure out what stories I would want to read (spanning all my interests from every source in the world) and display them on my screen every morning.
I just don't think something technologically (or business model-ly) innovative is going to magically make failing newspapers better reads.
Other than that I'd agree with you. It is Journalist's job to do the actual reinventing and they're no where close now. I just don't think they're capable enough to take the current generation of tools and build what they need to do it. Essentially they need "web journalism for dummies" and it needs to be 10 times easier to use than Wordpress.
Admittedly this is not something that journalists would or could use. Despite being (say) as easy as Wordpress, it just won't fit into today's journalist's worldview. But that's OK, journalists as we know them are a dying breed -- many just don't know it yet.
What could happen is (a) the rise of a new class of low-cost, low-profit "mini-publishers" using new turnkey applications to design content+layouts that appeal to their target audience. Then (b) what we think of today as "journalists", both newswriters and columnists, will disappear from the "news" industry. Columnists have already largely gone to blog but the newswriters have yet to change. My guess is that change will be forced upon them, and newswriters who want to continue in journalism will need to adapt. How? Possibly by becoming their own newswire. Instead of a few large wire services (AP and ilk) we will see thousands of individual "wire services", basically individuals covering local, family and/or specialty events. Few if any will be making a lot of money at this, but that's because of the economics of Internet news. The days of Clark Gable (and Clark Kent) journalism are over.
The key to all this is having a turnkey newspaper-in-a-box application that lets wannabe publishers design their own interfaces, choose their own content suppliers and publish on their own schedule. That's what YC should be funding. It's where the money (if any) will be made.
It also occurs to me that there is a business opportunity in helping folks start their own mini-wire-services. Structure the whole thing from scratch. Standardized processes for submission of news articles plus standardized usage and reimbursement terms (Michael Yon might be able to charge more than Jan Michael), but the process of choosing and using their output would be the same.
Maybe that's not the correct vision of the future, but I'm still sure the profession of "journalist" is going to change. Throw out today's molds and take a stab at what makes most sense to you. There's a fistful of dollars somewhere in there.
At the moment, it seems to me like we're finding new, social (in the W2.0 sense) methods of distributing information that are "good enough" to destroy the business model for news. "Good enough" doesn't mean their information is equal or better compared to the information that journalism yielded. Of course, most of this social news is still based off "MSM" news, but I believe that, as their availability decreases, their necessity as a base will aswell.
I think that sometimes there is a tragic logical error in some of the 'future of journalism' discussion: "The News business model is done. User's won't pay for the news any more. Ads don't scale. The hurricanes themselves won't pay, either. Thus, we have to find a new business model."
This last statement is always there, especially in the RFS and the entrepreneur's discussions following it here. But it is not a necessity. I guess it is a part of a healthy capitalistic mindset to see every industries downfall as an opportunity, but I get the feeling that some of the internets peer production developments escape this pattern: Wikipedia will not produce business opportunities for encyclopedia business, OpenStreetMap will not help NAVTEQ.
Of course each of these examples produces a periphery of new businesses, consulting opportunities and the usual post-processing stuff, but in their core they have de-economized industries.
So I get wary when I hear people talk on how to monetize post-news news. You really won't. Go write a blog post about some of your local communities problems instead.
You want to make money off journalism? Useful content funded by advertising is the one and only answer. If you can't make money from that, you're either not producing useful content, or you're carrying too much unrelated overhead in your company. In either case, find the place where you're not doing as well as you need to, and improve it.
Despite the popular opinion currently prevailing, the current situation in journalism is not some radical, never-before-seen catastrophe. It's good old common-sense economics at work: if you're not producing things people want, or if you're spending too much money to do it, you lose and someone else will take your place.
Find some people advertisers care about. Find out what those people care about. Give them high-quality stories about it, and don't hire any more people or spend any more money than you absolutely have to. Do these things, and you will win.
The elitist reasoning goes like this: MSM are only reporting MJ death stories etc. and this low-quality populism has cost them their readership. If they were to start doing serious reporting, all the clever people would come back and pay for their services. Of course, that's BS. The current reporting is directly created to reach the biggest audience, and it does. It works. The elites may go away ... but that's just a few eccentrics, who cares?
The Britannica argument is that distributed groups on the internet can never produce anything that is nearly as good as the stuff that is produced by experts. This is certainly true for art, but for Britannica it simply didn't work out: Wikipedia did produce quality articles and content.
Also, I can't help noting the contradiction in your comment: you claim that "mainstream" news organizations are simply doing whatever will bring them the widest audience, with the implication that this is how one turns a profit. Yet it seems quite clear that those same organizations are not quite so financially sound.
But there's another side to news: it's also the glue for society and this part depends on not being targeted at any specific group but at the "mass" as a whole. That's the part mainstream news has been trying to serve. But now that eyeballs are only worth something if you know who they belong to, this model is collapsing. In my previous post, I wasn't trying to argue that what these organisations are doing is sustainable, but thus far it seems to be the only pattern we have to commercially serving the whole of society. This mechanism failing is the real problem, because it's a central part of our democracy and culture.
Also, the quality criteria in this area are only tangentially related to factors like "truth" and "depth of reporting". A lot of the emphasis, instead, is focussed on aspects of commonality and actuality. Yet, when people argue that "good reporting" is what we need, this is often not what they mean.
Also you wrote "if you're not producing things people want, or if you're spending too much money to do it, you lose and someone else will take your place". That's right. But it should be our task to prevent that. A radical consolidation on the news market until just a few papers are left is not an option. This market is different to the one for chocolate or cars. This is about a vital variety of opinions and views.
A consolidation of opinions is not what we want. Trust me, I am German, it happened here some 80 years ago...
The phrase "you can't have aggregators without content" and suggestion that a writer is needed implies that this is content creation, not aggregation.
One way to start from making money is to let users pay to get what they want.
Here's one place it could lead: Let readers bid (or paying subscribers vote) on what they want investigated or discussed. Journalists are actually quite cheap, so a few hundred interested parties could fund a weeklong investigation by a professional journalist. You could also solicit leads and research assistance from the readers.
Then, once the story is published you still get any ad revenue, which could be targeted to the audience that you serve. Journalists could liveblog updates as they investigate, encouraging supporters to give additional funds to help them through the search. The editorial staff could float suggestions for stories and let users vote with their wallets on what they want investigated.
In this way users could also directly support the journalists who do good work, and the organization would scale by the level of interest.
Probably not what pg had in mind, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
So I'd modify your idea a bit -- have many short snippets about rumors/events that quickly introduces a subject, to build interest, and will be free to everyone. Then have followup stories that will be voted upon.
But I'd suggest that you sell the content to existing news outlets. That is, you occupy the same role as Reuters, and plug into an existing network.
Best of luck to the takers, but I would guess that the future of journalism looks like TechCrunch: organized by topic rather than by location, not particularly unbiased, and much smaller in terms of both number of employees and size of profits.
People paying directly for content suffers from another flaw - externalities. It makes no economic sense for any individual to sponsor public well being, so the Nash equilibrium is they don't do it.
I guess you'd need data crunchers to either 1) figure out how to make ads work, or 2) do market research.
Ads don't work in the context of general news, but they may work in verticals. Market research may not be big enough right now, but there is a general shift towards data-based decision making and if market research is cheap enough, more and more people would use it.
Google Knol has not done well in this space: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757287
America Online seems to be shooting for something similar: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/aol-newsroom-now-has-wo...
There's also squidoo and mahalo. Mahalo has recently done quite well in terms of growing traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo.com
It will be very interesting to see what startups emerge from this!
Dealing with information follows the (almost universal) five-step pattern: sensing > filtering > reasoning > creating > enjoying. It is like noise > signal > information > action > flow, or, fear > accept > share > use > love. And many more.
No one has to consider the existence of information sources. They will grow up instantly from individuals, local groups, global communities and professionals specialised on production.
The most important is to find the right channels for you and open as many channels possible inside you to let information flow through your senses.
Don’t bother about acquiring exact knowledge. Let your brain automagically store whatever seems to be important, go and discuss frequently your ideas to distill thoughts and opinions about what you have read. Create knowledge based on feedback.
The tool you need must focus on helping you channeling, tagging, formatting information and producing, sharing results/knowledge. The return will come from surprisingly unseen and now unpredictable receivers. Once you shift from consuming to producing you’ll open channels in other systems willing to recognize your effort.
More at http://clair.ro/blog/2009/08/17/future-of-journalism-the-per...
If that's what it is it seems like a poor investment; hopefully it's something better.
If it were that easy, "the" solution (just one?) would probably already have been found.
There are certain inherent advantages of reading on paper that just have not yet been adressed at all. Stop thinking about "bundling" or content - fitting content to a user's preferences is not the problem. Getting any time-pressed (and therefore potentially paying) user to at least consider consuming news/information digitally is the problem - it's just not efficient enough yet.
There might be a simple & obvious solution out there, but nobody has attempted it yet.
Of course, newspapers make money from advertisements, not directly from content. The business purpose of content is to attract eyeballs... the same business model of many web-based startups.
For pure content creation in the news area, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters is the best model I've seen. Every news provider seems to buy their content.
FOJ analyzes how people consume media to determine what news to distribute to the masses.
FOJ is essentially a browser plugin that not only analyzes what you are reading (meta data) but also how you are reading (eye-tracking, which is the secret sauce, and time-tracking ), and what you say about it (comments/tweets...). By combining the same information from a few hundred "content consumers" FOJ can determine a value for any particular news/topic.
FOJ allows content producers to know what topics interests people at any given time and give them a solid foundation (content wise) to write quick posts.
On the consumer side, FOJ works like the Stock market where the investors are the power content consumers and the money is the time invested reading and their comments.
That way instead of just aggregating the news, news would actually be created and talented contributors would float to the top. They could also share in the profits, since their value add is actually rated.
Their founder really gets it and they're doing well. (Acquired already too, with the founding team still committed to success).
http://westseattleblog.com (pulling in over $10,000/month off caveman simple display ads) http://uptownupdate.com (best neighborhood blog in Chicago, all writers are anonymous, they cover a rough, controversial neighborhood and overlook nothing) http://lakeeffectnews.com (laid off Chicago journo started her own site, bringing along the laid off ad sales person from her last gig)
I could rattle dozens more of these.
A free blog that turned into a private research firm for companies.
Quality journalism plays a critical role in our society. In every society - that includes the ones in "Western" states. The death of a newspaper in San Francisco or Boston is nothing less than a tragedy. Journalists do what they do - they write. They are obviously not exactly experts regarding the WWW and the "new" technology their distribution is based on now. They weren't capable of adjusting their business strategies and products to this disruption. Somebody needs to do that for them and the business model is not advertising alone anymore.
In the past they generated revenue from ads and from content bundling. In the print channel interesting and high-quality articles subsidized less interesting ones or even whole departments. On the web there are no bundles, content is atomized and shareable. Clicks and links are the currency and people only click on links to articles (and ads) they’re interested in. Therefore in my opinion the only possible solution is to stop relying on ads alone and start charging readers for the product itself, which is the content - INCLUDING the delivery and presentation of it.
Usually product development follows a business strategy of maximizing profit. Obviously that’s the profit of the company offering the product and not the profit of competitors and providers of supposed substitute products, like bloggers and evil news aggregators. But the technology makes the content shareable. It’s complicated and a somewhat "socialistic" approach to the problem would help. No worries, I don’t want to raise taxes or fees to finance the good, I certainly don’t think that’s the right way. All over the world press representatives ask the administrations to come up with ancillary copyright laws securing their interests. That’s ridiculous and shows that they didn’t even analyze the issue right.
Bottom line: I’d try the re-introduction of bundling through simple flat-rate payment - with a solution based on the economics of the web, not the print world. Readers don’t face any switching costs. If one publisher asks for payment they just go to another. But if we offer content of all sources in one place, combined with revolutionary features they don’t get anywhere else, there is something to charge for. Start focusing on the delivery and presentation of the content. Start listening to users’ needs instead of advertisers.
Journalists produce content. A third party platform is working as a personalized content hub based on simple XML-formatted or API-powered exchange of content and serving all kinds of reading devices. No, I am not talking about feed readers or Google News’ index but decent, well-planned apps and websites. The platform would have to offer really innovative features and top user experience and would be considered worth paying 2-3 USD/month. On a voluntary basis wealthy readers could even pay more and therefore get a higher "supporter status" they can communicate to the outside world (the same target segment already pays a lot for their LinkedIn accounts and other web-based services). It’s amazing what peer pressure can do.
That paid amount is being split and percentages are paid to the according publishers based on the user’s reading behavior. The meshing-up is contrary to the content strategy of most publishers today but could become interesting to them as soon as they face revenue in exchange. As a result publishers could focus on their core competency (investigating and writing) and earn from partly "outsourced" delivery, like they often did in times of paper delivery. They could also focus on niche topics to build up competency and reputation in order to be "followed" in those areas by readers through these hubs - a truly capitalistic mechanism.
Now the question is what are the killer features to make this happen? 1) The product would have to offer content from various sources. 2) It would have to improve the way readers can consume their daily or hourly news so drastically that they’re willing to pay a small amount. 3) Payment would have to be really simple. I do have thoughts on how to achieve this step by step with a freemium business model based on existing technologies and with existing shared content. I also have concrete thoughts on features as well as an almost finished product design. Personalization is the key.
I am looking for developers and front-end developers with state-of-the-art CSS and AJAX knowledge, who think what I just wrote is not just stupid utopia and would like to work on this sisyphean challenge. Who would like to build a team and apply at Y Combinator? I am an ex web developer and UI designer and recent MBA graduate and Xoogler from Germany.
Poll: approx. 34 % of users are willing to pay 2-5 USD/month
Mashable - The New York Times Asks Readers If They’d Pay For Online Version (http://mashable.com/2009/07/09/new-york-times-online-subscri...)
The New York Times - Let’s Invent an iTunes for News (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html)
Nieman Journalism Lab - How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-an-nyt-developer-built-...)
Google Code's PubSubHubbub publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to XML content exchange (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub)
TechCrunch - The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dea...)
"...Then charge an additional five dollars per month. Of those five dollars, keep one dollar for the company and distribute the remaining four dollars to content providers like a pie. For example, if a user subscribes to four websites, then each of those websites gets a dollar per month. Or if that same user subscribes to eight websites, then each gets fifty cents per month. The genius of this is that it not only does it give content providers a good reason to implement the system, but it gives them an incentive to turn their customers into your customers. In short, the promotion takes care of itself."
I remember posting here telling Tipjoy to do this as well, but I guess they never took me up on it.
Anyway the only way to push something like this through isn't by having a really well-written founder's blog (although that is critical), it's by being willing to sit down and have 10,000 coffee meetings with the bloggers and newspaper owners to get to know them in person. Right now I am creating a platform (c.f. swagapalooza.com) to introduce the world's most-followed bloggers to new and interesting products, if you decide to go ahead and build this then I'll let you use the platform to help make your system the de facto standard.
In my view it's necessary to involve bloggers but I don't think of them as journalists. They have other principles of investigating and sourcing and a different style of writing. Don't get me wrong, they're important and the fact that free blog providers enable potentially anyone out there to speak their minds on the big stage is a small revolution. Although not on one level with Gutenberg or the invention of the Net itself, like some say. But bloggers certainly are not the key to saving traditional journalism :)
I disagree. It will be far easier to convert bloggers than newspaper owners. And if newspaper owners see that bloggers are making more money than they are, they will eventually join as well.
The problem with starting with newspapers is that you'd need a critical mass, and that's very hard when you have 1,000+ players who each have a six-month sales cycle.
With bloggers, on the other hand, there are only a few key players and because each outfit is only a handful of people the sales cycle is only a few days at most. Unless I'm missing something, trying to sell to newspapers would be an enormous mistake.
See here:
http://getclicky.com/blog/164/announcing-contenturecom-a-new...
Your idea is very good but I guess it needs one or two years to become a product or service, by then Contenture will have evolved into something similar I guess.