

Business Class: Freemium for News? - pwim
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/business-class-news/

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petercooper
It struck me that not everything that was taken out was "noise". For example,
the "Most Popular Today" and "Most E-mailed" type stuff. They provide a handy
way to find the most potent stories of the moment that editorially directed
front pages can be a little slow highlighting.

Perhaps as well as the layout, the "business class" service could also include
better (and more immediate) forms of discoverability and curation to help with
the above, or even the ablity to create filters (so I could block out all
political or environmental stories, say).

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alizaki
I think news sites think of Most Popular, Most Emailed, etc as ways to
generate more pageviews, which is basically revenue. They're not based off any
personal relevance to the user. Which is why in the authors model of things,
they can be disposed of.

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petercooper
But without the ads and other true "noise" on the page, highlighting stories
isn't a revenue maker and, instead, provides the reader with a useful service.
BBC News has no ads (since I'm in the UK) and still uses a lot of content
highlights, 'popular' and similar boxes - they're very useful from a reader's
POV.

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riffer
Perhaps that's a good starting point for business class

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bodhi
Would 'access' be a business-class service? It seems rare to see a response to
commenters on eg. the NY Times blogs (I'm not an avid reader, so it may be far
more common than I think). So commenting and interacting with the journalists
& editors would be restricted to paying customers.

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estel
As massively anti-competitive as it sounds, it'll take an incredibly brilliant
news service and a fantastically cheap price for me to move away from the BBC
as my main source of online news. Relatively clean presentation, ad-free, and
a generally decent quality of reporting.

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Joakal
Rupert Murdoch is interested in solutions too after doing many private and
public ways for reducing BBC.

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benwerd
This is such a great idea. We already know, from companies like Spotify and
Netflix, that people will pay for convenience. (See the article about how
Netflix is killing BitTorrent from the other day.) We also know that the
paywall model is broken.

By creating a Business Class, news providers are creating a premium product
that is actually better. They could also add other value-added services, by
(for example) providing tailored notifications. They have a ton of data; why
not charge people to make better use of it?

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corin_
To an extent, this is already happening for some companies. For example, back
when NYTimes was still free online, I paid for the iPad app because the
experience was far superior.

Same thing with The Times' iPad app here in the UK (although I don't subscribe
to that because I hate their content, but I do love their iPad app.)

So it's not entirely a new idea, it just hasn't been pushed to its logical
conclusion yet.

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duck
Or... use <https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets>

There are a lot of (free) ways to end up with what they are showing, so I
don't think this matches the business/economy class comparison.

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corin_
Except that, with a business class flight, I don't need to bring my own bottle
of champagne and comfortable seat.

Obviously readability/etc. isn't _that_ much of a hassle, but I want to be
able to browse through the site and have a nice interface right there, not
browse through a nasty site, find an article to read, then move over to
another site to read it, then go back to keep browsing.

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duck
True... except for another big difference: you're not going to get all your
news from one site, so in a lot of ways having a decentralized way of handling
the way you view it is better since you get consistency across everything you
read.

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kingsidharth
That reminds me of the porn sites offering deals in packages including
multiple sites. Why can't news guys do the same? Several sources, put
together, make a package! (no pun intended).

