Online News is Broken
caseyaccidental.com
Online News is Broken
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Online News is Broken
#2The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a dark grey background, I bailed.
What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast between text and background?
Re: Online News is Broken
#3None of these are the reasons that online news is broken.
Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content.
This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the ads. "Wow, look how much nicer it looks! We're totally saving journalism." They aren't. They don't have to pay to produce content, so they can repackage it inexpensively or for free.
The truth is more people are reading the news now than ever before. 16 million people read The New York Times online last month. The print publication peaks at just over 2,000,000 on Sundays.
We don't need better social crowdsourcing of stories. We need more ways to pay for great content.
Re: Online News is Broken
#4[deleted]
Re: Online News is Broken
#5It really feels like this person has never gone on Reddit, despite it seemingly being a large competitor. The problems that plagued Digg do not apply as much to Reddit as there is less gaming the algorithms or superusers. Not to say they don't exist, but they are less of a problem. With regards to the inability to 'make it' as a normal user, look at the front page at any time and see how many posts mention their surprise at making it to the front page.
Re: Online News is Broken
#6None of these are the reasons that online news is broken. Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content. This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the…
A great example of this working are the Kindle editions where I can take a publicly available blog with an RSS feed and yet still feel completely content paying for issues to be sent directly to my Kindle rather than writing scripts or using services to do the same task.
Re: Online News is Broken
#7This conflates two issues. Online news being broken which I agree with emphatically, and online news discovery being broken and solved by limiting your sharing to a specific group of people which I'm skeptical about since I'm not sure how that's different to what existing giants in that space do.
Online news need a whole new revenue model that can support and encourage quality journalism instead of chasing ad impressions that encourages or perhaps demands the AOL-ification / Demand Media-ization that makes "news" a byproduct of an SEO and link bait game.
Re: Online News is Broken
#8None of these are the reasons that online news is broken. Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content. This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the…
[deleted]
Re: Online News is Broken
#9The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a dark grey background, I bailed. What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast between text and background?
I use the zap colors bookmarklet:
Re: Online News is Broken
#10None of these are the reasons that online news is broken. Online news is broken for one fundamental reason: It's currently hard to generate enough revenue from online ads to pay for the creation of high quality content. This is the only problem that needs fixing and anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic. Fancy news reading systems (Instapaper, Flipboard, Pulse, etc.) are nice because they strip out all the…
Jeremy is absolutely right here from the perspective of news organizations (which his company OwnLocal is trying help solve). There's a lot of experimentation going on - paywalls, porous paywalls, conferences and events (e.g. Techcrunch and the Atlantic), premium programs without paywalls (Reddit, Ars), sponsored content, syndication schemes, sponsored sections, etc.
But as for readers, while there's an evergrowing way to to discover, follow, and comment on news. HN, Reddit, Twitter, FB, among other social sites continue to grow. There's some algorithmic approaches to finding you personalized news (which has been tried MANY times), but there's a few good ones out there including Prismatic and the soon-to-be released Prismatic.
(Yes, I'm leaving out those who write for reasons other than direct money, but right now, online tools seem to be doing many of the quality writers pretty well - though I'm sure there are "C-list" bloggers who don't get the exposure they ought to).
So, the OP might be solving a portion of readers' problems - the overload and context problem, but Mims is dead-on -- the real problem with online news is how can you make enough money to pay smart people to write great stories in a world where advertisers have millions of other places to put their ads at prices much cheaper than what a news org needs to fund journalism like this: http://on.wsj.com/Qyu1DF