

Ask YC: Whatever happened to "The Future of News" RFS? - jkuria

Whatever happened to "The Future of News" RFS.
http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html<p>Did any startups do serious work on this?<p>These two articles today reminded me about it:<p>http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/21/read-all-about-it-great-american-newspapers-headed-for-oblivion/?iid=A_F_News<p>http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/21/news-aggregators-score-a-big-win/?iid=A_F_News
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ianterrell
NewsTilt (formerly NewsLabs) was shut down fairly quickly. Here's the deets:
[http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-
down...](http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/)

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ashraful
I was working on an idea for this RFS myself. Basically it was an itunes model
for news. Users could purchase a single news item (called a newslet) and by
doing so you would get access to all published and unpublished information
that are associated to that news topic.

Unfortunately, the only dev working on this with me left for greener pastures
and so I'm left working on this alone. I am a web designer with limited coding
skills, so I would not expect this project to launch anytime soon.

Here's a sneak peek at it though: <http://i.imgur.com/1Ltoz.png>

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jkuria
Cool. What price points were you thinking would work?

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ashraful
$0.99 and $1.99 for most news topics and $4.99 for the headline/big news
topics.

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salman89
I think the problem is that internet users have generally become accustomed to
the idea that written content, especially news, on the internet should be free
(supported by ad revenue). When ad revenue cannot support high quality
writing, the quality of journalism generally goes down (compare the news you
can read at AOL vs a print issue of The Economist).

The challenge is to create some value proposition that internet users will pay
for news content - I will be very interested to see how magazine subscriptions
perform on the iPad (and other tablet formats). Obviously magazine subscribers
would be the best market to go after as they are the users who already are
paying for written content.

