
YCRFS 1: The Future of Journalism - suvike
http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html
======
jfornear
Aside from crawlers, aggregators, CMSs, etc., I don't see how a small team of
programmers without any kind of editorial insight can really do anything
innovative for journalism. The real problem lies in the content, not the
distribution channels or monetization models. Technical solutions that ignore
what readers want won't succeed.

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.

~~~
alaskamiller
Here's the issue about this:

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.

~~~
evgen
While I admire the principle you are suggesting, the history and current
reality of the new distribution business suggests that this "try to be
objective" phase was a short-lived experiment that has no future. Newspapers
have always been editorial soapboxes, that is how they get attention in a
crowded field. Attention leads to readers/subscribers and readers are the
product. Now that we have some pretty good neurophysiology data on how people
process new information and with most of the current research suggesting that
"opinionated" news sources are going to be the winners based on how our brains
work I can't see any reason why the current trends are going to change.

------
ubernostrum
"Journalism" isn't going to be saved by data mining or algorithms or nice
design. It is not going to be saved by "hyperlocal" reporting. It is not going
to be saved by per-user customizable topical filters. It is not going to be
saved by search systems and RSS feeds for your neighborhood. It is not going
to be saved by content federation. It is not going to be saved by mashups. It
is not going to be saved by APIs. It is not going to be saved by putting
everything behind a paywall.

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.

~~~
pudo
I don't really follow the "quality will save us" argument. It combines two
very weak ideas into an even weaker one: the elitist news thing and the
Britcannica argument.

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.

~~~
ubernostrum
Quality is not a sufficient characteristic, only a necessary one. And saying
that people who want to make money need to offer a quality product or service
does not imply that only large and powerful companies can provide quality
products and services.

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.

~~~
pudo
There certainly are a lot of areas in which the model you propose has been and
will continue to be extremely successful: providing a specific group of people
- preferably domain experts of some sort - with the knowledge they need
remains a business model. In a way, this is also what the 'hyperlocal' people
are trying to do; everyone is an expert on their immediate neighborhood and
thus information about that should have a great value to them.

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.

------
GavinB
This is phrased almost as a guessing game, so forensic analysis of RFS 1 is in
order.

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.

~~~
leecho0
I like the idea, but I'm not sure people will necessarily know what they want
to read about. Take, for example, a disaster, people would want to know about
it as soon as possible. You don't want to wait until someone votes on the
topic before writing about it.

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.

------
lacker
This is particularly interesting as a RFS because Paul Graham's support will
get you publicity from the beginning, and if there is a social aspect to your
new news model, it will be able to get around the chicken-and-the-egg problem
of being able to attract initial users.

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.

~~~
ntoshev
It's not Techcrunch that PG has in mind though - they have nothing to do with
data mining.

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.

------
larryfreeman
This sounds very similar to what my company already does:
<http://hubpages.com>

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...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/aol-newsroom-now-has-
wow-1500-writers/)

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!

------
rms
<http://www.windycitizen.com/>

------
csbartus
The Personal News Agency

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...](http://clair.ro/blog/2009/08/17/future-of-journalism-the-personal-
news-agency/)

------
alaskamiller
I've asked all my j-school (USC, Columbia, UNC, Berkeley) friends and they
don't know. Most are just switching focus into media (ie, broadcasting)
studies.

------
frig
Sounds like subscription-only reddit wherein some algo flags trends and topics
of interest for which the staff writer(s) then crank out quickly-researched /
fact-checked summaries (possibly also scanning other aggregators / twitter /
etc for discernible trends and dispatching a human to investigate + summarize,
also).

If that's what it is it seems like a poor investment; hopefully it's something
better.

------
dsplittgerber
Houndreds of startups are already on work at this one. Thousands of articles
and proposals have been written about the problem. Yet no one seems able to
describe in only a few lines a business model that does not involve just
tossing out a few en-vogue words and other business bs like "revolutionary
features" and "bundling" and "freemium". These are not a solution in
themselves! Or am I the only one who sees it this way?

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.

~~~
catch23
the google founders were able to easily explain "PageRank" in just a few
words, yet nobody considered their approach during the era of Altavista &
Hotbot.

There might be a simple & obvious solution out there, but nobody has attempted
it yet.

~~~
dsplittgerber
Yes, exactly my point. It will be a simple & obvious (with hindsight!)
solution. I'm just saying that if it were possible with the current ideas
floating around (not just here), it would already have been done.

------
10ren
One original purpose of newspapers seemed to to advocate political views, a
factor which waned, then waxed as the industry consolidated.
<http://www.historicpages.com/nprhist.htm> Another factor was timely reporting
of battles. In the origins of the telegraph, the transmission of gold and
stock prices was one driving factor.

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.

------
rokhayakebe
FOJ (Future of Journalism):

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.

------
mlapeter
This might be a bit random, but I was thinking it'd be interesting to see
something similar to "object oriented news", where every part (sources,
writers, editors, photographers) is broken down into "blocks" and rated
according to the value they add:
<http://www.slideshare.net/secret/FPFC5tEoeQIKX5>

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.

------
jasonlbaptiste
check out <http://www.pegasusnews.com/>

Their founder really gets it and they're doing well. (Acquired already too,
with the founding team still committed to success).

~~~
dbul
Man, these neighborhood things are all over the place:

<http://southorange.patch.com/>

~~~
fallentimes
This one has been very successful:

<http://www.baristanet.com/>

~~~
brandnewlow
Also:

<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.

------
danw
Most interesting approach I've seen was Mobile Industry Review:
[http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-mobile-indsutry-
review-...](http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-mobile-indsutry-review-turns-
private-research-firm/)

A free blog that turned into a private research firm for companies.

------
dmillar
I wrote about this briefly a few weeks back. Got no karma love, but I don't
think I was far from what YC is looking for.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=714977>

------
suvike
I'm interested in the opinion of HN readers: PG says 'start from how to make
money'; should j-startups be starting from advertising, or paywalls, or
something else entirely?

~~~
zackattack
Information, when properly applied, yields a competitive advantage. The next
Bloomberg.

------
SueGreenwood
I love the arrogance: "We think [newspapers] will mostly die, because we think
we know what will replace them..." You sure you want a team to work on the
problem - or just to work on proving what you think you know? And why see the
answer only in terms of "a content site"? The way we access news and
information as individuals is already varied and becoming more so each month -
and that's before we start to think about what might be arounf next year and
the year after.

------
tybris
Micropayments for content providers, advertising revenue for aggregators, and
the legal system to protect the copyrights.

------
danielfranz
Somebody just wrote that there is good old common-sense economics at work. I’d
say the subprime crisis is also good old common-sense economics at work. That
doesn't necessarily mean it's a healthy thing and it's good for the industry,
for the economy or for society as a whole.

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...](http://mashable.com/2009/07/09/new-york-times-online-
subscription))

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-...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-an-nyt-developer-built-a-new-
way-to-read-the-news-online))

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...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dead-long-
live-the-news-aggregators))

~~~
Alex3917
I completely agree with your solution. This is what I wrote on my blog in
2005:

"...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.

~~~
danielfranz
Sounds like a good plan! My experience tells me that you have to be very
careful when mixing bloggers and journalists from publishing companies (if
that's what you intend to do). A lot of journalists perceive bloggers as a
threat. Although that seems naive I think it's a normal reaction.

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 :)

~~~
Alex3917
"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.

