
Online News is Broken - sandimac
http://caseyaccidental.com/online-news-is-broken/
======
jeremymims
None of these are the reasons that online news is broken.

Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to
generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high
quality content.

This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing
brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard,
Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the ads. "Wow, look how much
nicer it looks! We're totally saving journalism." They aren't. They don't have
to pay to produce content, so they can repackage it inexpensively or for free.

The truth is more people are reading the news now than ever before. 16 million
people read The New York Times online last month. The print publication peaks
at just over 2,000,000 on Sundays.

We don't need better social crowdsourcing of stories. We need more ways to pay
for great content.

~~~
acpigeon
It bothers me that the only paid model for content is to pay for the source. I
enjoy some pieces the New York Times publishes, but I don't want to pay for
the whole pipeline. I would however, be happy to pay something for individual
pieces of quality content.

Additionally, much of the content I enjoy reading is produced by people not in
it for the money, so there is no way to pay for it even if it did have
monetary value to me.

~~~
btilly
The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this.

If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares
deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right.

If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the
provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at
grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn't matter so much
because it doesn't affect your buy decision. And what people don't care about,
gets shortchanged.

The internet has caused us to move from a subscription model to a piecemeal
model, and the quality of news has suffered. But this is not new. A hundred
years ago the "yellow press" was also on a piecemeal model. So, more recently,
were British tabloids. And they were crap in the same way that the internet
news today is crap.

Unless you're either relying on a third party curation that you trust, or are
purchasing the brand, quality is going to suffer.

~~~
acpigeon
Subtle point, but your assumption (nearly everywhere else in this discussion
as well) relies on paying for content before you've consumed it. I haven't
heard much discussion on what happens if you remove that assumption.

If you could attach a frictionless transaction to a "Like" or "Kudos", I would
be happy to pay $1 a pop or something reasonable for a well researched blog
post after I've read it. Maybe not feasible for a wider public, but certainly
might have niche acceptance.

~~~
btilly
People have pursued such donation based models.

Nobody has succeeded in making substantial money on a per item basis. However
NPR manages to do it on a brand-based basis, but their signup rates are
something like under 1% of their dedicated listeners. It isn't easy.

------
brador
I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most
popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the
article bare for the masses. This is valuable. I'd pay for this.

But, and it's a big one, experts aren't cheap and their time is scarce.
They're not going to curate content for free all day like Reddits 12 year olds
and the granularity of expertise means you'll never cover everything with a
small number of experts.

Two solutions: volume through scale to fund expert curation or find a way to
gather and have them work for free. Maybe the research journal system could be
used to provide non-financial incentives?

~~~
petercooper
I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something
_like_ this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing
it. One example: <http://javascriptweekly.com/> .. and an actual issue:
<http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html> .. I have almost 80,000
subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more
(so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm
close to exhausting my topic range).

~~~
brador
How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?

~~~
petercooper
Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first
couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way -
[http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-
in-2-days-m...](http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-
foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html) \- but since then it has been primarily a
case of word of mouth and "domino" growth.

For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into
JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few
thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like
Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there.

The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby
people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)

------
JumpCrisscross
The _Financial Times_ has great journalism. It costs me $300+/year. I also
love _The Economist_. It costs $100+/year. They could both probably hike rates
without a noticeable attrition is readers.

Luckily for me there is a market for premium financial journalism (the
recognisable sources cited poll at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of
annual cost). For other types of news, however, my willingness to pay for
quality is too small a market. In the space left behind we get people cribbing
about news aggregators and paywalls.

------
crazygringo
> _"news is ... at a fast and furious pace, without a lot of context, and
> largely filled with what companies want to get out instead of what they
> don’t want to get out."_

High-quality news with high-quality context and interpretation can only really
be generated by highly-paid, extremely educated and learned journalists. And
it takes time to research and write -- you can't get quality analysis and
context 2 hours after an event.

The best example of quality reporting that comes to mind for weekly news is
_The Economist_. Although there is also some excellent long-form journalism in
the _New Yorker_ , _The Atlantic_ , _Rolling Stone_ , _Vanity Fair_ , etc. And
if we're talking about online, for me the whole point of Instapaper is to
bookmark these articles to read later.

And I really don't see how crowd-sourced content is the future for news. Most
good Wikipedia articles take months if not years to build up. I just don't see
how approaching the quality level of _The Economist_ is possible with crowd-
sourcing. The kind of people who have the kind of extreme skills and education
to write at that level, do it for a living, not for fun on the Internet.

~~~
Kroem3r
The Economist has a distinct and significant point of view. If you can assess
their material appropriately, it is an excellent weekly.

There are stacks and stacks of excellent periodicals. You've named a few
rather "pop" publications; if you want, you could stretch out for The NY
Review of Books or Foreign Affairs. Both are characterized by having highly
authoritative contributors writing long pieces and great editing.

------
kmfrk
I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up,
there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's
inherently derivative.

The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary
Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it.

Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very
well, but this will do:

    
    
        “Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional?
        Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand?
        Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over?
        Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”
    

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.html?pagewanted=all)

It bothers me that people equate "news" and "journalism".

------
benologist
This conflates two issues. Online news being broken which I agree with
emphatically, and online news discovery being broken and solved by limiting
your sharing to a specific group of people which I'm skeptical about since I'm
not sure how that's different to what existing giants in that space do.

Online news need a whole new revenue model that can support and encourage
quality journalism instead of chasing ad impressions that encourages or
perhaps demands the AOL-ification / Demand Media-ization that makes "news" a
byproduct of an SEO and link bait game.

~~~
enfinity8
Watch nwzPaper...the revenue innovation is on the way!

------
joeconway
It really feels like this person has never gone on Reddit, despite it
seemingly being a large competitor. The problems that plagued Digg do not
apply as much to Reddit as there is less gaming the algorithms or superusers.
Not to say they don't exist, but they are less of a problem. With regards to
the inability to 'make it' as a normal user, look at the front page at any
time and see how many posts mention their surprise at making it to the front
page.

~~~
onecaseman
Yeah, I for space reasons I treated them as more similar than they are.
Definitely a weakness of the post. My problems with Reddit are more my lack of
ability to use it to filter only relevant content for me and strip out, for
lack of a better phrase, the "geek content" that's always on its home page.
Just seems really hard for a non-tech guy to navigate/get value out of. My
concern is not getting content there, but being able to only read the right
content for me as a user.

~~~
skymt
Reddit's mechanism for filtering content is "subreddit" subscriptions. For
example if you're only interested in links about movies and music, you
subscribe to the subreddits for those subjects. Of course, as Reddit's
demographic is geeky, so is its taste in entertainment, so the best that'll
get you is geeky movies and music.

The big killer feature that could have helped is user-created subreddits. You
could create reddit.com/r/quibb, run it on an invite-only basis, and moderate
the submitted content to keep it close to your ideals. Of course, that would
only solve the problems of content and membership; it would do nothing to fix
Reddit's design.

You're right that Reddit does context poorly. Perhaps you should look at
Metafilter as an example of how to add context to aggregated news. Take this
post for (an exceptionally long) example: [<http://metafilter.com/120387>] It
has a single main link summarized above the fold, with a large amount of
historical context and supplemental links below it. Most posts to Metafilter
don't go quite that deep, but almost all provide at least one or two extra
links on the subject.

~~~
enfinity8
News content is distinguished from all other content by the nature of its time
sensitivity value and geographic relevance to information consumers. nwzPaper
has launched a system that can push content in real-time from a global level
all of the way down to the local level instantly when a journalist publishes.
The UI is intuitive and much better than reddit. It also provides a journalist
perspective for added background on the author. Did I mention direct
subscription...and it's not rss?

Check it out:

<http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4>

------
lutusp
The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to
know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a
dark grey background, I bailed.

What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the
very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast
between text and background?

~~~
mikestew
Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I
didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my
daily news reading.

~~~
lutusp
> Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic ...

I regularly see HN posts get downvoted simply for being negative, regardless
of the topic. In this case, I think the criticism is both justified and
constructive. And I see you agree. :)

> I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as
> my daily news reading.

I think it's an age thing. There's a certain age at which adorning oneself in
dark colors makes one cool, above it all. And designing one's pages according
to accepted norms makes one a sell-out. I would be more certain about this
were it not for the fact that I am so old that, not only was there no Internet
when I was young, there wasn't even FM radio. :)

------
natrius
If you agree that online news is broken and want to help fix it, I'd love to
hear from you. I'm attempting to fix it by both improving content and
improving revenue. It's a fun problem to work on.

niran@niran.org

------
enfinity8
nwzPaper.com is fixing it. Setup a journalist profile, publish an article and
spread the word.

<http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4>

~~~
halayli
I will assume you are trolling.

~~~
enfinity8
For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to
rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss
technology innovation?

~~~
namidark
Your website is barely usable, half the links don't work or do anything, and
there are 3 articles. And you've spammed this article multiple times.

You're hardly rebuilding the news business.

\- An information distributor that is neutral on the content message.

Like Google News or any other hundred of news aggregators?

\- A platform that empowers the journalist to decide what to write, when to
publish and makes the journalist subject only to the market forces of his or
her subscribers.

Like a blog?

\- A subscriber experience that offers everything in a familiar format, in one
place and leaves the choices of who and what to read up to you.

An aggregator again? You haven't solved anything that is a real problem (such
as how to pay for quality journalism).

