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Online News is Broken

caseyaccidental.com

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Re: Online News is Broken

#11

Post by JumpCrisscross »

The Financial Times has great journalism. It costs me $300+/year. I also love The Economist. It costs $100+/year. They could both probably hike rates without a noticeable attrition is readers.

Luckily for me there is a market for premium financial journalism (the recognisable sources cited poll at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of annual cost). For other types of news, however, my willingness to pay for quality is too small a market. In the space left behind we get people cribbing about news aggregators and paywalls.

Re: Online News is Broken

#12

Post by crazygringo »

> "news is ... at a fast and furious pace, without a lot of context, and largely filled with what companies want to get out instead of what they don’t want to get out."

High-quality news with high-quality context and interpretation can only really be generated by highly-paid, extremely educated and learned journalists. And it takes time to research and write -- you can't get quality analysis and context 2 hours after an event.

The best example of quality reporting that comes to mind for weekly news is The Economist. Although there is also some excellent long-form journalism in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, etc. And if we're talking about online, for me the whole point of Instapaper is to bookmark these articles to read later.

And I really don't see how crowd-sourced content is the future for news. Most good Wikipedia articles take months if not years to build up. I just don't see how approaching the quality level of The Economist is possible with crowd-sourcing. The kind of people who have the kind of extreme skills and education to write at that level, do it for a living, not for fun on the Internet.

Re: Online News is Broken

#13

Post by onecaseman »

jeremymims wrote: post #3

None 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…

I agree that's the main reason online news is broken, and I started with that reason in my post. I'm proposing that the high quality content part won't be fixed, and see a possible alternative is us and our peers doing more work ourselves to provide the context that matters to us in our jobs.

Thanks for reading.

Re: Online News is Broken

#14

Post by onecaseman »

joeconway wrote: post #5

It 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 surp…

Yeah, I for space reasons I treated them as more similar than they are. Definitely a weakness of the post. My problems with Reddit are more my lack of ability to use it to filter only relevant content for me and strip out, for lack of a better phrase, the "geek content" that's always on its home page. Just seems really hard for a non-tech guy to navigate/get value out of. My concern is not getting content there, but being able to only read the right content for me as a user.

Re: Online News is Broken

#15

Post by onecaseman »

lutusp wrote: post #2

The 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?

It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Perhaps it looks different on different computers. I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal.

Re: Online News is Broken

#16

Post by brador »

I suggest the next step is crowd sourced expert curation. Some of the most popular posts on Reddit are where an expert enters the comments and lays the article bare for the masses. This is valuable. I'd pay for this.

But, and it's a big one, experts aren't cheap and their time is scarce. They're not going to curate content for free all day like Reddits 12 year olds and the granularity of expertise means you'll never cover everything with a small number of experts.

Two solutions: volume through scale to fund expert curation or find a way to gather and have them work for free. Maybe the research journal system could be used to provide non-financial incentives?

Re: Online News is Broken

#17

Post by skymt »

onecaseman wrote: post #14
joeconway wrote: post #5

It 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 surp…

Yeah, I for space reasons I treated them as more similar than they are. Definitely a weakness of the post. My problems with Reddit are more my lack of ability to use it to filter only relevant content for me and strip out, for lack of a better phrase, the "geek content" that's always on its home page. Just seems really hard for a non-tech guy to navigate/get value out of. My concern is not getting content there, but…

Reddit's mechanism for filtering content is "subreddit" subscriptions. For example if you're only interested in links about movies and music, you subscribe to the subreddits for those subjects. Of course, as Reddit's demographic is geeky, so is its taste in entertainment, so the best that'll get you is geeky movies and music.

The big killer feature that could have helped is user-created subreddits. You could create reddit.com/r/quibb, run it on an invite-only basis, and moderate the submitted content to keep it close to your ideals. Of course, that would only solve the problems of content and membership; it would do nothing to fix Reddit's design.

You're right that Reddit does context poorly. Perhaps you should look at Metafilter as an example of how to add context to aggregated news. Take this post for (an exceptionally long) example: [http://metafilter.com/120387] It has a single main link summarized above the fold, with a large amount of historical context and supplemental links below it. Most posts to Metafilter don't go quite that deep, but almost all provide at least one or two extra links on the subject.

Re: Online News is Broken

#18

Post by lutusp »

onecaseman wrote: post #15
lutusp wrote: post #2

The 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?

It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see. Perhaps it looks different on different computers. I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal.

> It should be white text on a blue background. That's what I see.

Let's let readers judge for themselves: http://i.imgur.com/6Qtch.png

That's gray.

> Perhaps it looks different on different computers.

Yes -- something that's not true for black text on a white background.

> I am NOT a designer though, so I won't even pretend to argue the current design is optimal.

In that case, a more conventional design might be a better choice -- one in which the contrast between text and background is sufficient to render your pages readable.

I've always favored sites that set themselves apart with their atypical content rather than their atypical color choices.

There are many examples of practical color choices. Everywhere you look, there are sites with reasonable choices. HN, for example.

Or visit the most popular web sites:

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/most-popular-websites

Notice anything? All of them have black text on a white or very light background. No exceptions.

More on this topic:

http://contrastrebellion.com/

Re: Online News is Broken

#20

Post by enfinity8 »

benologist wrote: post #7

This 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 impress…

Watch nwzPaper...the revenue innovation is on the way!
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