

PG: "News organisations can learn from start-up culture" - mark_h
http://www.journalism.co.uk/5/articles/535577.php

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Herring
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

-Maslow

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boggles
Wasn't that Mark Twain?

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biohacker42
I think politico is the true herald of the digital journalism future. They are
hard journalists, they are small and efficient like a startup, and they are
profitable. They are also very narrowly focused.

The problem with the majority of currently falling news organizations is the
fat profit margins they've been enjoying. And there's no helping them.

Let me put it this way, after the railroads no amount of cleverness and
inventiveness was going to save the pony express.

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brandnewlow
One big problem/wrinkle with the "Politico is the future" thesis is that
Politico makes all it's money by selling classified ads in a weekly print
newspaper it distributes across Washington D.C. according to Vanity Fair:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200908)

From what I recall of the piece: The guy funding Politico originally wanted to
publish a weekly Capitol Hill insider paper. The well-known editors and
journalists who left the WaPo to start Politico convinced him that going hard
on the web, breaking news every hour etc was the way of the future.

Yet, the original, "boring" idea, to offer a weekly Capitol Hill paper, is
where they make all their money. The web site is in some ways just a marketing
tool for their print product.

So when people tell me "doing a Politico" is how to make news on the web, I'm
skeptical. That approach is a great way to build a brand, but you still need a
way to convert that brand into $$$. That's where we need innovation.

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biohacker42
Everything you say is fact, and yet I completely disagree with your
interpretation of the facts.

The original "boring" idea would be bankrupt by now if it wasn't for the
website. So yes, they are using the web as advertising, that doesn't mean it's
not the key to their existence.

And they are making money by selling a physical product, there's a lesson
there too. How many free websites are funded by selling shwag? Isn't Joel's
free blog selling fogbugz? There's a pattern here.

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brandnewlow
"The original idea would be bankrupt if it wasn't for the website."

Citation needed.

The point of my comment was to point out that all the stuff about being "fast,
lean, quick, lo-fi, bloggy" or whatever news buzzwords you hear bandied about
as being the solution are not in fact the solution in and of themselves since
they have nothing to do with actually making money.

At the end of the day, Politico's a lot like College Humor. It has a content
web site it uses to promote a physical product where it actually makes money
(T-shirts in CH's case). I don't know that there's much to learn from that
example.

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ujjwalg
Can someone throw more light into this idea YC is working on? I am damn
curious, given that <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> mentions techcrunch on
one side and reddit on the other (News will morph significantly in the more
competitive environment of the web. So called "blogs" (because the old media
call everything published online a "blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are
one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these
are just the beginning. ) And essentially, given the fact that HN is far
better than any of the two.

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thaumaturgy
I don't know that YC specifically is working on a particular idea -- I think
they're just interested in someone else who might be.

We're currently looking at making it possible for anyone to easily become
either a news aggregator/publisher or a local news reporter, through a mostly
decentralized system which is still easy for news consumers to navigate. We've
found a wazoo's worth of revenue streams in this.

Just a matter of making deadlines now.

