

YC 2010 startup needs journalists as early users - stealthyc2010
http://secretjournalismstartup.posterous.com/yc-startup-call-for-journalists

======
mjw
Interesting.

I have a few journalist friends (as no doubt do you guys) and pointed a couple
of them at this.

Sure you've seen this already, but you'll probably find that a lot of your
target market (well-trained but under-employed journalists) are quite bitter
and resentful that they've been reduced to this. Despite the best intentions
of startups like these, ultimately they just want someone who'll give them a
honest day's pay on a stable basis to get on with what they love doing,
writing well-crafted stories.

Not all journalists will necessarily be entrepreneurial sorts, and the ones
that are will often be able to seek out geeky friends to help them out online
anyway.

With that in mind, there are a lot of sites out there on the internet with
too-good-to-be-true sounding propositions on how they can help you make money
online, build an audience etc. Once burned twice shy with these sorts of
operations - often it turns out they pay you peanuts to be a cog in the wheel
of a SEO-spam factory which profits them more than anyone else. Even with the
best intentions just to offer people better tools on a win-win basis, it's
hard to avoid coming across as scammy or profiteering when dealing with people
who're feeling unemployed and vulnerable career-wise.

So, I guess what I'm saying is you might really want to make sure you stand
out from the crowd of "join our SEO-spam-factory and make pennies on the
dollar for page impressions while we hoard pagerank" borderline-scams, both in
the eyes of geeks and in the eyes of journalists who might not be able to tell
the difference but just feel wary.

Would need branding and marketing that really speak to journalists in their
own language, not in the language of the smug social media consultant telling
them what they need to change about the way work THIS week in order to carry
on making a pittance online :) (edit: not that you appear to be doing that at
all)

(Also, speaking as a geek whose helped out journalists in the past, if the
tools being offered lock you inextricably into some company's hosted
ecosystem, I'd be a bit skeptical - I'd want tools I could use with an
existing website where i have control - take google analytics for example -
but I may not be your typical audience)

Anyway hope that didn't come across too negative, I'm glad more people are
taking on what's such a tricky problem!

~~~
robryan
Problem is journalists looking for a stable income from a high quality
operation won't jump on this because it's unproven but to prove this concept
you need these quality journalists.

An area like this probably requires a large initial investment to give
journalists who do join some job security while the site looks to build up
readership.

~~~
ErrantX
I ran the numbers along with my regular publisher for doing something possibly
similar (though only guessing based on what they are saying) here in the UK.

You could probably pick up solid but cheap freelancers to join in (one of the
magazine the publisher owns encourages community generated content and quite a
few tech writers got a start through it) simply because it would mean
increased output for them (not being at capacity like super-pro writers
generally are) and hence more money.

But it's so so hard to compete with what the print mags would pay. We talked
to a few freelancers who said they wanted at least 50% of what they would get
for print - but twice the uptake (i.e. twice as many articles). That's
hundreds of dollars per article you have to shell out for a few months before
advertising picks up to cover it.

I think it's going to be tough to do this.

I saw they were promising payments, elsewhere, of 30-70K. That is "serious
writer" territory and they aren't going to get any of them.

It was the ultimate reason I haven't emailed what looks like an interesting
idea - 70K is such a ludicrous promise it sounds like they barely know the
talent pool :(

(though maybe US journalism works like that, I dont know)

~~~
stealthyc2010
We are aiming to get journalists a fair wage. We aren't promising payments of
30K-70K, but we needed numbers to put in the box on the Poynter site, so we
put in our targets.

Do email us, you sound interesting. I'm paul [at] newslabs.com or paul.biggar
[at] gmail.com.

~~~
ErrantX
Sorry I sounded so negative - now you've clarified things it looks a lot
better. Your right the low profile thing probably worked against you, unfairly
I guess.

I'll drop an email when I get chance.

------
p0ppe
Couldn't find any info regarding your market. Are you launching worldwide
right away? Journalism tends to be a fairly local thing, so targeting the
right market is of some importance.

~~~
stealthyc2010
There isn't anything about our market, because we're not specific to any of
them. If you are a journalist, write about what you are interested in. So far,
we've had interest from people who write about finance, about tech, about
gaming, and lots and lots of local journalists.

~~~
mjw
So long as you don't plan on lumping them all together into one big amorphous
news website that tries to cater to all tastes but has no real editorial focus
or voice. Give them tools to find / understand / build their own audience.

Sounds like you're on the right track there though.

------
morisy
Journalism: Based on bringing transparency. Secretjournalismstartup: Clouded
in secrecy.

While this dichotomy has always been present in news media (some ink-stained
retches, including yours truly, will protect scoops and anonymous sources to
the grave), not knowing who is really behind this beyond people "funded and
advised by YCombinator, the people behind Reddit, posterous, and Justin.tv"
doesn't encourage faith. Maybe the mystique will make up for it.

~~~
mattlong
Based on the submitter's username, stealthyc2010, it should be clear that the
startup is still in "stealth mode". This is somewhat common in the tech
startup world. The veil will almost assuredly be lifted before they launch.

~~~
morisy
I completely understand that, and tried to make my comment come as a critique
rather than a criticism. Two of the most important factors in how much people
trust news, however, is a) the source's reputation and b) who is paying for
its generation, and how.

Asking journalists to potentially sign on without disclosing the latter can be
a risky professional move for them, which could have a negative effect on the
venture's success.

~~~
ErrantX
Agreed. I write a reasonable amount of freelance print tech copy and have been
looking for something interesting like this to move online.

But the secrecy is putting me right off :(. I guess they will give you more
insight via email.

(getting into _serious_ online journalism is pretty hard btw)

~~~
stealthyc2010
We were only trying to be secret to not build hype when the product isn't
ready. Backfire! We hope you aren't put off. We are going to be as open and
transparent as we can be.

(I should point out in that case that I'm only using this name for
consistency. I'm pbiggar on HN.)

------
marciovm123
any reason to hide that you're <http://newslabs.com/>? same phone number on
both pages.

~~~
ivankirigin
Don't you think that this lacks courtesy to post a comment rather than just
email them? I mean, if there were a reason (and I can think of at least 3)
then you just ignored it.

~~~
axod
FWIW I think most people would google for the phone number. I did.

Trying to be stealth is just an invitation for everyone to start googling to
find out all they can.

~~~
abstractbill
Yes, but there is a difference between being curious and finding out whatever
you can, and posting the results of that search to a public forum - especially
when the word "secret" is in the contact email address. It just seems a little
unnecessarily unkind.

~~~
ErrantX
I suspect it never really occured the grandfather - because there wasnt really
any secrecy, this is a community that generally scoffs on secrecy as "a bit
silly really" and there appeared to be no harm in spreading possibly
interesting knowledge.

Not deliberately malicious I am sure.

I was going to post it too but checked myself at the last minute.

------
ig1
I'm no expert on this area, but from what I've seen ad revenues are nowhere
near high enough to pay for decent journalism. If they were we wouldn't have
the pay-wall debate.

Affiliate links tend to be a huge no-no because of conflicts of interest.

Publications generally only buy articles if they have first right of
publication.

Suggesting someone can earn 30K-70K on the above basis seems over-optimistic
to the point of being misleading.

~~~
stealthyc2010
Yes, we'll be working on the ad revenues. They certainly aren't high enough to
support a massive media organization. They should be high enough to support a
low-overhead one-man journalism show.

There are other revenue streams, too. It remains to be seen which is the best
for us.

------
yumraj
<JOKE>

How nice of them: _you focus on the content. We handle making money_

</JOKE>

~~~
brandnewlow
That's the bitterness that the top commenter here referred to. The journalists
I know are largely resigned to being crapped on by whoever they work for. They
create all the value (similar to a programmer at a startup run by biz-ev guys)
while someone makes the money and then gives them a small piece of it. They're
use to getting crapped on like this.

That said, they're really picky about who they let crap on them. Someone might
let the HuffPo crap on them so they can share space with celebrities and get
lots of hits on their story. Someone might let the NYTimes crap on them,
because, it's the New York Times!

So if this startup's going to run the same game, they'll need to have a good
reason for journalists to want to get crapped on by them.

~~~
stealthyc2010
No-one is being crapped on here. I've updated the CFJ to hopefully make that a
lot clearer.

------
burtherman
I have founded a group called Hacks/Hackers at <http://hackshackers.com>
bringing together journalists and technologists -- sounds like a good fit with
what you're doing. Let's get in touch -- also glad to hear from anyone else
here interested in this space!

------
messel
Can a centralized source provide all the specialized technical support and
services a real web living news agency will need? Alternatively would
Huffington Post and Techcrunch be willing to add to their tech team by paying
for this service?

The only differentiators I can see are: "Lead generation: get tips from your
readers automatically get sources for your stories find out what stories
people want to hear about, before they know themselves! Collaborate with other
journalists."

The other services (submit links, show ads) have questionable value. I have
high hopes for a model like this though. I was looking for an open source
model like a dedicated Wordpress though.

------
brandnewlow
I'm really interested to see how they'll handle liability. If they want to
make a lot of money, I'm going to guess the founders won't be vetting anything
before it gets published. However, if they're pushing it on Reddit, writing
the checks, selling the stuff to other publishers, I'd find it hard to see a
DMCA claim holding up. At that point they're doing a lot more than for their
content creators than Youtube or Scribd, making them accomplices in any libel
lawsuit that might come up.

Will they go to the wall for one of their writers? Doubtful.

So do they have a new angle on the legal side of things?

~~~
stealthyc2010
Interesting question. I'm guessing since you ask about the DCMA you're asking
about copyright. Well, we'll vet all our writers, and it should be no problem
at all. We'll also delay payment of new writers so that there is no way to do
some kind of grab-and-dash.

Its also much much much easier to search for copyrighted material in text than
in video or flash content. I can't imagine solving this will be a hard
problem.

------
johnrob
Why limit the search to journalists? If my understanding is correct, Arrington
didn't have any prior experience in the news industry before Techcrunch.

~~~
stealthyc2010
Its not strictly limited to journalists, but its focus will be news, and we're
looking to restrict the authors to high quality writers.

While I expect to widen the platform to all comers in the long term, we'll be
very careful how we do it. It'll be our equivalent of reddit's search for how
to do subreddits well, and Facebook figuring out how to let everyone in.

------
wyclif
_The are too many sites which are generic content repositories trying to eek
ad revenue from google searches. We are a place of quality journalism._

"Eke", you meant? Since you're "a place of _quality_ journalism", you may want
to fix that.

P.S. As you can see, I'm not only a quality writer, but a quality proofreader
as well. Feel free to get in touch.

~~~
stealthyc2010
Done, thanks. Who needs spell checking when you have HN :)

~~~
wyclif
I'd also capitalise "google". I know it can be a verb, but you're using it
here as a noun.

------
brandnewlow
They're advertising for journalists on Poynter. That's definitely the place to
do it! Well-played.

<http://careers.poynter.org/jobdetail.cfm?job=3311446>

~~~
prawn
"30 openings. ... while this isn't a paid position, we only earn money if you
do. (So the 30K-70K is an estimate, not a concrete figure)."

Could be Mahalo or similar based on that text?

~~~
omarchowdhury
But the journalists here are doing more than copy and paste.

------
ananthrk
Looks like you are addressing problem [3] as explained in "Startup ideas we
did like to fund" (<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>). Excellent!

------
stealthyc2010
Hi folks, we're NewsLabs (pbiggar and nchong on HN). We never intended to use
secrecy to hype stuff up, just to be a bit quiet until we had more built.

------
brandnewlow
So it's a YC version of TrueSlant.com? Could be cool! Good luck, guys!

~~~
stealthyc2010
Yeah, similar alright. We have different outlook. The writers for our site
aren't "contributors". Rather, they are the stars and we are providing a
service to them.

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marciovm123
Great area to work on =)

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rms
Cool!

