
That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/that-whining-sound-you-hear-is-the-death-wheeze-of-newspapers/
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justindz
I'm kind of curious how many people would pay a monthly or annual subscription
fee for a "newspaper" that came out in electronic and/or premium print format
only to subscribers, published an edition whenever the hell it had enough to
publish it and contained hardcore journalism geared towards ending waste,
fraud and abuse and informing the public of bad actors.

It would be pirated, but the pirates would always get it a little bit later
and the print copy would be ad free. Some kind of premium channel blog service
would let subscribers follow the work of the journalist, side notes, follow-up
ideas, etc. up to the point where it's not compromising the integrity of the
work.

Something like that. I'm eager for any ideas people have that will get the
civic activism back in newspapers and kick the cruft out. I don't think they
actually need to come out on a fixed schedule and I really don't think they
need to cover lifestyle, sports and other things the way they do now. They
need to focus on stuff that's not easily duplicated and they need to take
their time really kicking some ass. The Internet can pick stuff up from there
and expand the impact.

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pj
People don't like their labor going to someone else's profit.

------
firebug
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - Paul Graham - July 2008

<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

"#3: New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The
problem is not merely that they've been slow to adapt to the web. It's more
serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are
exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the
wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories
about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional
things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested,
but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives. "

~~~
pclark
I wonder how many news related startups applied.

