

Are journalisms start-ups being appropriately funded? - jsm386
http://charman-anderson.com/2010/10/13/are-journalisms-start-ups-being-appropriately-funded

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morisy
Good piece, but the Knight Foundation is offering relatively huge investments
to teams that can, generally, provide most or all of their funding for a year,
with very few strings attached. The open source string is a very major one,
but I think it also offers a great reminder of one fundamental media truth:

 _Technology will not save you._

Look at the newsy startups recently profiled, like Swivel and Verifiable:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788264>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786982>

Both bet big on proprietary newsy technology, and both busted out. Meanwhile,
what does TechCrunch use? Nobody cares. CrunchBase is their proprietary
technology, and while I think it is a really cool asset, it probably drives
very, very little of their value.

Look at WordPress, which is now driving some huge percentage of the world's
media, both mainstream and particularly user-generated. They open sourced and
gave away all their valuable assets, but their commercial side is very
profitable.

Same can be said for TechMeme to an extent, where the technology isn't so much
the value as the people driving it, and that's an aggregator, where
personalities aren't supposed to have as much a part of play.

With Knight Foundation, you're given a huge experimental bucket of money and a
year's head start to innovate with it. By the end of that year, if you lose
because you open source, you probably would've lost with a proprietary
product, too.

