
The Future of the News Business: A Monumental Twitter Stream All in One Place - aaronbrethorst
http://a16z.com/2014/02/25/future-of-news-business/
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mtbcoder
Interesting that the author cites crowdfunding, philanthropy and subsidization
as a means to fund news organizations, but fails to mention the great work
done by NPR, PBS Newshour, Frontline, Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, et al.
Instead, the author chooses to highlight several outlets that are "doing it
right" but who deploy the very same advertising schemes which the author
derides earlier on in the article.

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nl
_At the same time, the market size is dramatically expanding—many more people
consume news now vs. 10 or 20 years ago. Many more still will consume news in
the next 10 to 20 years. Volume is being driven up, and that is a big, big
deal._

Does Marc mean more people in the US consumer news now than before, or world
wide? If it is world wide I think that is probably true (because of rising
access and literacy if nothing else) but if it is in the US is it actually
true? I imagine back in the 70's and 80's when everyone watched the nightly
news and everyone subscribed to a paper the numbers would have been pretty
high.

It's an important point because Marc claims it is pushing up the amount of
money in the market, but if it is international readers it isn't necessarily
as simple. (It's not _necessarily_ untrue, but much more complicated)

 _One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall”
between content and the business side._

Oh wow. I can see the outrage now.

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jameshart
Yes. And his point about global addressable market would make more sense if he
first addressed the actual _Chinese wall_ between Chinese people and news
content.

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pron
The problem with all those new approaches is understanding what a news
organization is and how it operates. The author of this post mentions
bundling, but bundling in a news organization isn't defined by customer needs
but by operational needs. A news organization needs to have expert assets in
various locales _before_ news breaks out (so it's not the Baghdad bureau
problem, but the Africa bureau problem or the India bureau problem). Bundling
serves as a cross-subsidy. People pay a fixed (high) price for a bundled
newspaper in order to read an interesting story, but that story may come from
Paris one day and from Pakistan another. Once stories are unbundled, this can
simply no longer work.

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gcb0
running news was hard because it wasn't about breaking the latest crap in a
knee jerk. Good newspaper differentiate by having a great analysis of
yesterday news. with great writing and knowledge.

tv had already brought most of the instant-and-dumb news. but there was at
least a bit of source checking and a crude analysis on the late night news.

now, it's 100% knee jerk breaking news. in less than 140 chars. if you call
this the future, good luck.

then the article just drones on a dumb list of "20 ways every office worker
that has a blog already tried to monetize it". nothing new or noteworthy.

~~~
ttctciyf
Back in 2008, British journalist Nick Davies was making noises[1] about how
marketplace dynamics impact news standards:

    
    
      I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff
      University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories
      from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian,
      Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking
      things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of
      their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the
      stories were wholly composed of material researched by
      reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be
      sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly
      or partially constructed from second-hand material,
      provided by news agencies and by the public relations
      industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that
      these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found
      this was happening in only 12% of the stories.
    

_12% of stories had been fact-checked_ \- I wonder how that number will fare
in the coming "big opportunity for the news industry [...] to increase its
market size 100x AND drop prices 10X"?

1: [http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-
earth-...](http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/)

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mrdrozdov
This was published over a year and a half ago, and I believe it was timed
nicely with a16z's investment into BuzzFeed. I would argue that a Facebook
stream looks more like the future than a Twitter stream these days (just look
for the most prominent icon in the candidate debates). It might also be worth
mentioning that quality may not be the right metric for news, rather it's
probably consumption. Consumption is also easier to measure.

~~~
mrdrozdov
As a follow up, here's one of my favorite articles on measuring journalism
metrics.
[https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/201...](https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/2013-07-25-One-
year-after-finding-a-metric-for-news.md)

It also serves as an entry into the rabbit hole of this slippery topic.

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retube
Not sure the Guardian is the best example. They well be growing online but no
one is paying for that and they're haemorrhaging customers of the physical
paper who actually pay for it.

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thanatropism
He cites both Business Insider and Pando as his own success stories.

The folks from Pando (Paul Carr et al.) used to relentlessly mock Blodget and
BI for their catastrophically bad journalism.

