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Online News is Broken

caseyaccidental.com

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Re: Online News is Broken

#21

Post by mikestew »

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?

Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.

Re: Online News is Broken

#22

Post by 001sky »

mikestew wrote: post #21
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?

Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.

I agree, this should not be down-voted per se, as its not really an "ad-hominem" atack on the article, given the subject matter. Its a fair critique on readability. "Readability" is central to the discussion for a bunch of reasons:

(1) The "brain damage factor" is relevant tradeoff to consider, if and when present;

(2) or lack thereof is a nother key determinant of success; and

(3) failing to understand (1) & (2) damages credibility ever-so-slightly.

Let us not forget the subject: competition, criteria, and selection of optimal media platforms.

Finally, this article // is a bit // // with its finish.

Re: Online News is Broken

#23

Post by enfinity8 »

skymt wrote: post #17
onecaseman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

News content is distinguished from all other content by the nature of its time sensitivity value and geographic relevance to information consumers. nwzPaper has launched a system that can push content in real-time from a global level all of the way down to the local level instantly when a journalist publishes. The UI is intuitive and much better than reddit. It also provides a journalist perspective for added background on the author. Did I mention direct subscription...and it's not rss?

Check it out:

http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4

Re: Online News is Broken

#24

Post by acpigeon »

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…

It bothers me that the only paid model for content is to pay for the source. I enjoy some pieces the New York Times publishes, but I don't want to pay for the whole pipeline. I would however, be happy to pay something for individual pieces of quality content.

Additionally, much of the content I enjoy reading is produced by people not in it for the money, so there is no way to pay for it even if it did have monetary value to me.

Re: Online News is Broken

#25

Post by enfinity8 »

acpigeon wrote: post #24
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…

It bothers me that the only paid model for content is to pay for the source. I enjoy some pieces the New York Times publishes, but I don't want to pay for the whole pipeline. I would however, be happy to pay something for individual pieces of quality content. Additionally, much of the content I enjoy reading is produced by people not in it for the money, so there is no way to pay for it even if it did have monetary v…

nwzPaper.com launched a platform to emancipate the journalist and unbundle the content from the legacy aggregated subscription model.

Re: Online News is Broken

#26

Post by lutusp »

mikestew wrote: post #21
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?

Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic, but it seems relevant to me. I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.

> Maybe you got down-voted for being off-topic ...

I regularly see HN posts get downvoted simply for being negative, regardless of the topic. In this case, I think the criticism is both justified and constructive. And I see you agree. :)

> I didn't even finish the first page, let alone put up with such a design as my daily news reading.

I think it's an age thing. There's a certain age at which adorning oneself in dark colors makes one cool, above it all. And designing one's pages according to accepted norms makes one a sell-out. I would be more certain about this were it not for the fact that I am so old that, not only was there no Internet when I was young, there wasn't even FM radio. :)

Re: Online News is Broken

#27

Post by kmfrk »

I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up, there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's inherently derivative.

The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it.

Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very well, but this will do:

    “Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional?
    Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand?
    Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over?
    Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.h...

It bothers me that people equate "news" and "journalism".

Re: Online News is Broken

#28

Post by enfinity8 »

kmfrk wrote: post #27

I'm so sick of the "curation" discussion - if companies like NYT go belly-up, there won't be anything for Huffington Post et al. to "curate". It's inherently derivative. The clip of NYT's David Carr discussing this in a debate in the documentary Page One is unavailable, but I encourage people to watch it. Clayton Cubitt originally described professionalism versus amateurism very well, but this will do: “Can an amateu…

News and journalism are the same information content. Curation is distinct from production and the world will be fine without the NYT. Thanks for the downvote, pal.

Empty complaints and no intellectual contribution.

Re: Online News is Broken

#29

Post by petercooper »

brador wrote: post #16

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…

I don't know if this is quite what you mean but I've been doing something like this for a couple of years now and am bringing in decent revenues doing it. One example: http://javascriptweekly.com/ .. and an actual issue: http://javascriptweekly.com/archive/96.html .. I have almost 80,000 subscribers to publications like this now and people seem to keep wanting more (so I'm looking for and bringing in expert curators, as you suggest, since I'm close to exhausting my topic range).
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