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Online News is Broken

caseyaccidental.com

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Re: Online News is Broken

#31

Post by austenallred »

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 completely agree with you. Putting a new UI on news won't fix it, neither will new ways of aggregating and sorting the stories that currently exist.

But there are two sides to the equation you mention, that revenue from ads needs to be greater than the cost of content. I love what your company (http://ownlocal.com) is doing, but I also don't think you should rule out the other side of the equation. What if a company can create a more compelling solution at a lower price? (That's what we're trying to do at http://grasswire.com).

Re: Online News is Broken

#32

Post by enfinity8 »

halayli wrote: post #30
enfinity8 wrote: post #19

nwzPaper.com is fixing it. Setup a journalist profile, publish an article and spread the word. http://nwzpaper.com/articleView?articleId=4

I will assume you are trolling.

For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss technology innovation?

Re: Online News is Broken

#33

Post by btilly »

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…

The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this.

If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right.

If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn't matter so much because it doesn't affect your buy decision. And what people don't care about, gets shortchanged.

The internet has caused us to move from a subscription model to a piecemeal model, and the quality of news has suffered. But this is not new. A hundred years ago the "yellow press" was also on a piecemeal model. So, more recently, were British tabloids. And they were crap in the same way that the internet news today is crap.

Unless you're either relying on a third party curation that you trust, or are purchasing the brand, quality is going to suffer.

Re: Online News is Broken

#34

Post by namidark »

enfinity8 wrote: post #32
halayli wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will assume you are trolling.

For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss technology innovation?

Your website is barely usable, half the links don't work or do anything, and there are 3 articles. And you've spammed this article multiple times.

You're hardly rebuilding the news business.

- An information distributor that is neutral on the content message.

Like Google News or any other hundred of news aggregators?

- A platform that empowers the journalist to decide what to write, when to publish and makes the journalist subject only to the market forces of his or her subscribers.

Like a blog?

- A subscriber experience that offers everything in a familiar format, in one place and leaves the choices of who and what to read up to you.

An aggregator again? You haven't solved anything that is a real problem (such as how to pay for quality journalism).

Re: Online News is Broken

#35

Post by natrius »

If you agree that online news is broken and want to help fix it, I'd love to hear from you. I'm attempting to fix it by both improving content and improving revenue. It's a fun problem to work on.

niran@niran.org

Re: Online News is Broken

#36

Post by Kroem3r »

crazygringo wrote: post #12

> "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…

The Economist has a distinct and significant point of view. If you can assess their material appropriately, it is an excellent weekly.

There are stacks and stacks of excellent periodicals. You've named a few rather "pop" publications; if you want, you could stretch out for The NY Review of Books or Foreign Affairs. Both are characterized by having highly authoritative contributors writing long pieces and great editing.

Re: Online News is Broken

#37

Post by brador »

petercooper wrote: post #29
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,…

How do you get subscribers / traffic to reach 80k? Paid ads?

Re: Online News is Broken

#38

Post by enfinity8 »

namidark wrote: post #34
enfinity8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For users. This is on topic as nwzPaper just launched the core platform to rebuild the news business. What's the problem, isn't this a place to discuss technology innovation?

Your website is barely usable, half the links don't work or do anything, and there are 3 articles. And you've spammed this article multiple times. You're hardly rebuilding the news business. - An information distributor that is neutral on the content message. Like Google News or any other hundred of news aggregators? - A platform that empowers the journalist to decide what to write, when to publish and makes the jour…

Respectfully, sir, you don't understand what you are talking about. If you had ever built something from nothing, as in, before the first line of code you wouldn't be speaking with your tone. Arrogance in the extreme!

Every link works. There are three million+ locations built into the system to organize content geospatially. When you speak of a broken link, did you get a 404? No! You received no content because you and the other 7 billion people on earth haven't learned what it is and contributed information to your community.

nwzPaper is not another aggregator crawling the web for content. Everything a user contributes is published to our system and that's what enables real-time content publishing around the world. It's all nuance that somehow went over your head.

The blogs you speak of are toast because of the legal distinction the courts have made between bloggers and journalists. The blogosphere is structurally broken because it has no adhesive beyond a search engine and lacks he ability to have a uniform audit facility for users and their content.

Try again. You are the enemy of innovation.

Re: Online News is Broken

#39

Post by acpigeon »

btilly wrote: post #33
acpigeon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this. If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right. If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn'…

Subtle point, but your assumption (nearly everywhere else in this discussion as well) relies on paying for content before you've consumed it. I haven't heard much discussion on what happens if you remove that assumption.

If you could attach a frictionless transaction to a "Like" or "Kudos", I would be happy to pay $1 a pop or something reasonable for a well researched blog post after I've read it. Maybe not feasible for a wider public, but certainly might have niche acceptance.

Re: Online News is Broken

#40

Post by btilly »

acpigeon wrote: post #39
btilly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental issue that people are oblivious to is this. If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right. If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn'…

Subtle point, but your assumption (nearly everywhere else in this discussion as well) relies on paying for content before you've consumed it. I haven't heard much discussion on what happens if you remove that assumption. If you could attach a frictionless transaction to a "Like" or "Kudos", I would be happy to pay $1 a pop or something reasonable for a well researched blog post after I've read it. Maybe not feasible…

People have pursued such donation based models.

Nobody has succeeded in making substantial money on a per item basis. However NPR manages to do it on a brand-based basis, but their signup rates are something like under 1% of their dedicated listeners. It isn't easy.

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